Vera Rubin

Her Story

Vera Rubin was born Vera Florence Cooper, on July 23, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the younger of two sisters while her parents were Jewish immigrants. The family moved to Washington when she was 10.

At about age 10, while lying in bed, I started watching the stars just move through the night. By about age 12, I would prefer to stay up and watch the stars than go to sleep. I started learning, going to the library and reading… There was just nothing as interesting in my life as watching the stars every night. I found it a remarkable thing.

She earned her bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1948 from Vassar college,becoming the only graduate that year. She then tried enrolling in a graduate program in Princeton but was barred due to her gender as Princeton did not accept women as astronomy graduates. She then went to pursue her graduate studies at Cornell.

That won't be the last time her gender would affect her professional life. One time she recalled, she was excited to be summoned to a meeting with the eminent astrophysicist George Gamow, only to learn that they would have to talk in the lobby because women were not allowed upstairs in the offices.

Another time by Dr Faber's account she had to battle for access to a 200-inch telescope on Palomar mountain in California jointly owned by Carnegie and Caltech. When she did get there, she found that there was no women’s restroom. As her friend and institute colleague Neta Bahcall later told Discover magazine, Dr. Rubin taped an outline of a woman’s skirt to the image of a man on a restroom door, making it a ladies’ room.

Rubin did not enjoy being put in controversial position time and time again but she did not let it affect her work. “Don’t let anyone keep you down for silly reasons such as who you are,” Rebecca Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, recalled being counseled by Dr. Rubin. “And don’t worry about prizes and fame. The real prize is finding something new out there.”

Even with the controversies and having 4 children, she pioneered great work. Her most notable research was done when she sought out to ask a simple question of how fast stars in a galaxy rotate around thee center.

The idea being simple- the force of gravity affects how the rate of rotation of the body Thus as we go further away from the fixed mass at the center, the rotation velocities should go down the way Pluto on the outskirts of the solar system takes 248 years to go around the sun while Mercury takes only 84 days.

We could find out the mass of galaxies from the amount of light we got from them. To Rubin (and her collabrator Kent's) surprise, the rates did not seem to decrease on the edges of galaxy. This meant there was some matter at the edges slowing down the rates

Eventually it became clear that the universe had to be filled with this matter, 5-10 times more of it than the ordinary matter that makes up stars, gas and even us. This matter didn't interact with light at all and since we couldn't see, it was termed 'Dark Matter'. Rubin's results were confirmed over subsequent decades and became the first persuasive results supporting the theory of dark matter.

In 2016, at the age of 88, Vera Rubin passed away. Her resilance, curiosity and dedication to finding something will keep inspiring generrations to come.

“Fame is fleeting, my numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that’s my greatest compliment.”

-- Vera Rubin