Vera Rubin

Vera Rubin

Born: July 23, 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

Died: December 25, 2016, Princeton, New Jersey

Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who discovered that the rotation rates of the outermost stars in spiral galaxies did not reduce as expected from Newtons laws of gravity but remained constant as in the spokes of a wheel. This was a startling finding and provided evidence for the notion of Dark Matter that is the subject of much speculation today.

Vera Cooper was born into a Jewish family, the younger of two sisters. Her father Phillip immigrated to the USA from Vilnius, Lithuania, and was an electrical engineer at Bell Labs. Her mother, Rose Applebaum, came from Bessarabia, now Moldova, and worked at Bell Labs until they married.

The family moved to Washington DC where Vera developed her interest in astronomy, building a simple telescope with help from her father. She studied stars and meteors and developed a passion for questioning how the universe worked.

She graduated from Vassar College in 1948 with a BA in astronomy. She was refused entry into the Princeton graduate program because she was a woman. She married Robert Joshua Rubin in 1948 and followed him to Cornell, they had four children, 3 boys and a girl. She earned her master’s degree in 1951, studying the motions of galaxies.

During her graduate studies at Cornell, she studied the motions of 109 galaxies and made one of the first observations of deviations from Hubble flow (how the galaxies move apart from one another). She worked with astronomer Martha Carpenter on galactic dynamics, and studied under Philip Morrison, Hans Bethe, and Richard Feynman. Though the conclusion she came to – that there was an orbital motion of galaxies around a particular pole – was disproven, the idea that galaxies were moving held true and sparked further research Her research also provided early evidence of the supergalactic plane. This information and the data she discovered was immensely controversial. After she struggled to be allowed to present her work at the American Astronomical Society despite being visibly pregnant, she was summarily rejected and the paper was forgotten.

Rubin studied for her Ph.D. at Georgetown University, the only university in Washington, D.C., that offered a graduate degree in astronomy. She was 23 years old and pregnant when she began her doctoral studies, and the Rubins had one young child at home. She began to take classes with Francis Heyden, who recommended her to George Gamow of the neighboring George Washington University, her eventual doctoral advisor. Her dissertation, completed in 1954, concluded that galaxies clumped together, rather than being randomly distributed through the universe, a controversial idea not pursued by others for two decades. Throughout her graduate studies, she encountered discouraging sexism; in one incident she was not allowed to meet with her advisor in his office, because women were not allowed in that area of the Catholic university.

In 1965 she joined the Carnegie Institution of Science. It was here that she completed a careful study of the rotation of galaxies. She found that the outermost stars in spiral galaxies were orbiting the galactic center as fast as the stars much closer to the center. In fact, the outermost stars were travelling so fast that they ought to fly apart from the galaxy. She concluded that there must be an invisible quantity of unseen matter surrounding the galaxy that provided the extra gravity to make this possible. She further concluded that this “Dark Matter” must be five times more massive than the visible matter. This result confirmed a similar claim by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 where he coined the term Dark Matter to explain the anomalous movement of galaxies in galactic clusters. Zwicky was not a popular astronomer, and his claim was ignored until Vera Rubin published her results and had them confirmed by others.

Rubin never won the Nobel Prize for her research on galactic motions. She was highly regarded by her peers who thought that she should have been awarded a Nobel Prize. Many of her female colleagues claimed that she pioneered the way for women in astronomy and was a guiding light for them. She was a trailblazing astronomer, a passionate champion of women in science, and an inspiring role model to generations of scientists, Rubin was loved and admired by her many colleagues and friends.

She died on the 25th of December 2016 from complications of Dementia.