Rounding out our trio of influential women in science is astronomer Vera Rubin, whose observations and calculations provided the first empirical evidence of a mysterious unseen entity lurking throughout the universe. In the 1970s, while observing the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, Rubin and her collaborator Kent Ford noticed that the stars in this spiral galaxy appeared to defy the fundamental laws of physics. The entire galaxy, it seemed, was spinning at the same speed—despite most of the mass being concentrated in the center. In fact, the outer stars were moving so fast that they should have been hurled out of the…
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