‘Notable Women’ Playing Cards Honor Late Astronomer Judith Young and Mother

UMass Amherst: News Archive

A project celebrating international women in science was launched online this week featuring a new deck of playing cards that honors 54 “Notable Women in the Physical Sciences,” including the late UMass Amherst astronomer Judith Young and her mother, Vera Rubin, also an internationally recognized astronomer.The project is intended to draw attention to the accomplishments and contributions of women in several branches of physics, mathematics, electrical and computer engineering, planetary science, astronomy and in science communication.
Bunny Laden, founder and president of the California-based “Notable Women” card project, says that to the best of her knowledge, Rubin and Young are the only mother-daughter pair in the deck.
Among the “Notable Women,” Young appears on the Five of Diamonds and is also featured in a blog post by the project founder Laden. Young’s card notes that among many accomplishments, she won the Maria Geppart-Meyer Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career,and that she is known for pioneering galactic structure research and for creating the UMass Amherst Sunwheel.
Young created the circle of standing stones that align with the rising and setting sun during solstices and equinoxes. She began building the astronomical calendar in 1997 near McGuirk Alumni Stadium and for more than 15 years led seasonal sunrise and sunset gatherings at the site. Astronomy department head Stephen Schneider and others have continued them since her death in 2014 at age 61.  
Young had come to campus in 1979 as a postdoctoral research associate at the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory, where she collaborated with Nick Z. Scoville on a study measuring carbon monoxide and the cold gas content of galaxies. They discovered the distribution of gas and light is proportional in galaxies. In 1982, the American Astronomical Society recognized this work by awarding her the Annie J. Cannon Prize for promising research by a young woman ...

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