Vera Rubin, Cornell University Graduate and Dark Matter Pioneer, Will Be Featured on a U.S. Quarter

Dr. Vera Cooper Rubin has been awarded the honor through the American Women Quarters Program, which was launched in 2022 by the U.S. Mint

The astronomers at Cornell University in New York are no strangers to groundbreaking discoveries, and one alumna’s contributions to science will now be honored on a U.S. quarter.

Dr. Vera Cooper Rubin has been selected for the accolade through the American Women Quarters Program, which is launched by the U.S. Mint and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The program began in 2022 to highlight the contributions of women throughout history with a new individual design on the quarter’s reverse side.

Also being honored in 2025, the program’s final year, is athlete Althea Gibson, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low, disabilities activist Stacey Park Milbern and journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells. The five new quarter designs will be rolling out over the next several months.

According to Cornell’s alumni publication Cornellians, which first reported on the news of the astronomers being named to the program, Rubin graduated from Cornell in 1942 and later went on to uncover the existence of dark matter. It was in 1985 that she presented her findings to the International Astronomical Union.

At the time, scientists viewed the universe as expanding after the Big Bang, and they thought that astronomers could chart the motion of galaxies within this expanding model. However, Cornellians reports that astronomers discovered a "peculiar velocity" in galaxies that couldn't be explained by the standard model at the time.

But Rubin’s research, which spanned several decades, uncovered the motion of galaxies in greater detail. Through her observations of light from distant galaxies, she and her colleagues discovered that the outer edges of galaxies rotate at nearly the same speed as their inner edges.

This finding, which was presented at the IAU in 1985, upended scientists’ conceptions of the universe and opened new pathways for astronomy and physics research. It also led to further studies that ultimately confirmed the existence of dark matter, which is a mysterious substance that is thought to make up the majority of the universe’s mass.

For her contributions to science, Rubin was later named a U.S. National Medal of Science in 1993 and went on to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2002. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 88.

In addition to being recognized for her groundbreaking research, Rubin is also the first Cornell alumna to be pictured on a circulating U.S. coin, and she is the only astronomer to be featured on a circulating coin, according to the former director of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum Jay Beeton.