There is an article buzzing around the Internet that asks: Where are all the women astronomers. Well, you may may not know their names, but they are there, changing the way we look at the Cosmos. In the NASA photo above Tracy Caldwell Dyson, a chemist and NASA astronaut, looks at Earth from the International Space Station.

Vera Cooper Rubin: Dark matter detective

In the early 1970s, Vera Rubin teamed up with astronomer Kent Ford and others to study the rotation of spiral galaxies, according to the Jewish Women's Archive. To their surprise, they found that the predicted angular motion didn’t match what they were seeing. In fact, galaxies were rotating so fast that predictions showed they should break apart if the only thing holding them together was the gravity from their visible stars. Rubin and her collaborators hypothesized that some invisible glue — an unseen mass — must be at work. The group’s groundbreaking work provided the first direct evidence of the existence of invisible dark matter, that mysterious stuff that makes up most of the universe but gives off no energy or light.

Carolyn Porco: Queen of the rings

Carolyn Porco is something of a rock star among astronomers. She's not only a prolific writer, but she is also frequently profiled and interviewed by the media. Porco also finds time for groundbreaking research, beginning in the 1980s with her work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In fact, she’s considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the planetary rings and moons that circle these giant outer planets. Porco is now leading the imaging team on the Cassini mission, which is orbiting Saturn. Among her greatest discoveries so far are the giant geysers of icy particles (indicating the presence of water) on Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus. Porco is also an imaging scientist on the New Horizons mission, presently en route to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt at the farthest edges of our solar system. You can hear Porco's TED talk about Saturn in the video above.

Nancy Grace Roman: Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope

Born in 1925, Nancy Grace Roman organized a backyard astronomy club for her friends when she was 11 and never stopped reaching for the stars. She went on to get her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Chicago in 1949 and became NASA’s first chief of astronomy — and the first woman to hold an executive position there. Roman’s greatest achievement is perhaps her pioneering crusade to develop orbiting telescopes, including the Hubble.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Pulsar pioneer

In 1967, while working toward her doctorate at Cambridge University, Jocelyn Bell Burnell observed strange pulsing signals coming from space through the school’s new radio telescope that she had helped build with her thesis adviser, Antony Hewish, and Sir Martin Ryle, according to Britannica.com. Through meticulous research, she and her colleagues eventually identified these radio signals as coming from a rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, as it became known. Burnell was listed as the second author on the paper announcing the discovery of pulsars but was snubbed by the Nobel committee, which jointly awarded the prize in physics to Hewish and Ryle in 1974. 

Margaret J. Geller: Cartographer of the universe

The universe is a big place, but that hasn’t stopped Margaret Geller from trying to shrink it to an understandable size. From the beginning, her goal has been nothing short of godlike: to map all that can — and can’t — be seen in the cosmos. The prize-winning Geller received a Ph.D. from Princeton and taught at Harvard. She works as a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where she studies the structure of galaxies.

Debra Fischer: Exoplanet hunter

Like Columbus and Magellan before her, Yale astronomer Debra Fischer is an explorer of new worlds — except these new worlds aren't on Earth. She and her colleagues have located hundreds of planets outside our solar system that orbit other suns. Fischer was finishing graduate school just as the first extrasolar planet was discovered in the 1980s. Her doctoral thesis happened to be on Doppler spectroscopy, a method used to detect exoplanets. 

Carolyn Shoemaker: Comet chaser

With hundreds of asteroids and dozens of comets to her name (more than any other astronomer), Carolyn Shoemaker is a legend. Perhaps her greatest claim to fame is the 1993 co-discovery with her husband, Eugene, and amateur astronomer David Levy of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. When they found it, the comet was orbiting Jupiter in pieces, apparently shortly after being grabbed by the mammoth planet’s gravitational forces and torn apart. 

Heidi Hammel: Outer planetary astronomer

When Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 met its end in 1994, it was young Heidi Hammel and her team who helmed the Hubble Space Telescope from Earth to photograph and study the colossal event. As a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute and executive vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Hammel’s research centers on Neptune and Uranus — the oft-disrespected “Rodney Dangerfields of the solar system” as the New York Times so aptly described them.

Sandra Faber: Decoder of galaxies

Astronomer Sandra Faber has spent a lifetime seeking scientific answers and in the process has changed the way astrophysicists view the heavens. A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and interim director of the UC Observatories, Faber’s decades of research revolves around the evolution of structure in the universe and how galaxies form. She co-discovered the Faber-Jackson relation (a way of estimating the distances to other galaxies by linking their brightness to the speed of stars within them), helped design the world’s largest optical and infrared telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and leads the largest Hubble Space Telescope project in history — CANDELS — to understand galaxy formation close to the time of the Big Bang. In 2013, President Obama awarded Faber the National Medal of Science.

Jill Tarter: Alien tracker

Like Ellie Arroway, the heroine of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel “Contact,” Jill Tarter devoted decades to scanning the heavens for life in the field known as SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including a stint as director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. In fact, Jodie Foster consulted with her during filming of the movie version of "Contact.” Inset photos: NASA (Vera Rubin); Gene Shoemaker/USGS (Carolyn Shoemaker)

Read more: Mother Nature Network