Named in honor of American astronomer Vera Cooper Rubin (1928– ), who has studied the motions of gas and stars in galaxies and the motions of galaxies in clusters. Her observations have been fundamental to our understanding of the distribution of mass in the universe. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, she received the National Medal of Science in 1993 and in 1996 became only the second woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. (M 29670) _ _.