Vera Rubin was an American astronomer who, in the 1970s, provided key evidence for the existence of dark matter. She measured that stars at the edge of the nearby Andromeda galaxy were moving just as fast as those at the centre—impossible if only normal matter were present. Her discovery demonstrated that an invisible form of matter, interacting with normal matter only through gravity, must pervade the universe.
The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, conceived in the late 1990s to study the dark universe, is named in her honour.
Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.