Vera Rubin died on Sunday. She was one of our most important astronomers and was the first person to discover evidence of dark matter
The science community pushed for Rubin to get a Nobel Prize, hoping she’d break a more than 50-year streak without a female winner, according to The Washington Post. One supporter of this movement, University of Washington astronomer Emily Levesque, told Astronomy.com that “the existence of dark matter has utterly revolutionized our concept of the universe and our entire field; the ongoing effort to understand the role of dark matter has basically spawned entire subfields within astrophysics and particle physics at this point.”