“Don’t shoot for the stars, we already know what’s there. Shoot for the space in between because that’s where the real mystery lies.” — Vera Rubin July 23, 1928 — December 25, 2016

“Stay afraid, but do it anyways. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.” — Carrie Fisher October 21, 1956 — December 27, 2016

“Someone has to save our skins. Into the garbage chute, fly boy.” — Princess Leia

Last week we lost two incredible lights, both explorers of the vast darkness of space: Carrie Fisher was best known for her role as a Princess who led the fight against tyranny throughout the galaxy, and Vera Rubin was a scientist who used telescopes to explore the reaches of space well beyond our own galaxy and made discoveries central to our current understanding of the entire universe.

As a child, Star Wars was everywhere, and it was one of the first movies I saw. Aside from Princess Leia, women were essentially nonexistent in the original movies — other women had a total of 63 seconds of speaking in all three movies combined. But there was Leia — strong willed, determined, committed to her cause, unwilling to let anything stand in her way. To me, she was the right kind of Princess — not waiting for anyone to save her or give her permission to take charge and get things done. Seeing Leia's strength and determination on screen mattered, and inspired me to think beyond daily life and towards the stars.

Early on in my career as a physicist, I became inspired by a real-life explorer of the stars and everything in between — the astronomer Vera Rubin. Vera got interested in astronomy as a child, looking at the stars in the night sky outside her bedroom window, when she said she “would prefer to stay up and watch the stars than go to sleep.” She didn’t know any astronomers, but said “It never occurred to me that I couldn’t be an astronomer.”

However, Vera faced isolation and exclusion at many turns. Her high school physics teacher told her: “As long as you stay away from science, you should do okay.” Princeton wouldn’t even send her a graduate school brochure because they didn’t admit women at the time. She once had to have a meeting with a famous astronomer in the lobby of his building because women were not allowed upstairs in the offices. In the mid 1960s, she was the first woman allowed to use the telescope at Palomar Observatories, where she later did her most groundbreaking work. They didn’t have a ladies room, so she just put her own stick figure sign on the bathroom door.

When Star Wars was released in 1977, Vera Rubin was in the middle of doing her most influential work. She was interested in galaxy dynamics — how stars move within their galaxies — and decided to look at the outskirts of nearby galaxies. She found something extremely surprising: the stars were rotating faster than expected, suggesting there was much more mass there than the “visible” stars would have predicted. This was the first evidence of “dark matter” in galaxies — mass that does not emit or absorb any light. Most likely, the universe would not be able to form galaxies at all without dark matter — the extra mass is needed to pull gas together and allow it to get dense enough to form stars.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this work to our modern understanding of the cosmos — Vera quite literally discovered about 85% of the mass of the universe! Many think that Vera should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for her important discoveries. Incredibly, the Nobel Prize in Physics was last awarded to a woman 53 years ago, and has been awarded to only two women (but 201 men!) in its 116-year history.