Vera Rubin
1928 – 2016 · United States
Known for: Astronomer whose galaxy rotation measurements gave the first strong evidence for dark matter
“I decided at an early age that we inhabit a very curious world.”
Biography
Vera Florence Cooper was born in Philadelphia on July 23, 1928, the younger of two daughters in a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. After the family moved to Washington in 1938 she began watching the sky from her bedroom window, built a rough telescope out of cardboard with her father, an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone, and taught herself to track meteors. A high school science teacher advised her to consider art rather than science; she went instead to Vassar College, where Maria Mitchell had once taught, and in 1948 took her degree in astronomy as the only graduate in the subject that year. Princeton would not admit women to its astronomy program, so she completed a master's degree at Cornell in 1951 and a doctorate at Georgetown in 1954 under George Gamow, concluding that galaxies cluster rather than scatter evenly through space, an idea largely ignored for two decades.
After a decade of short appointments around Washington, including teaching at Georgetown, Rubin joined the Carnegie Institution in 1965 and found her essential collaborator in the instrument maker Kent Ford, whose sensitive spectrograph could measure faint starlight at the outer edges of galaxies. She had made her first observations of galactic rotation in 1963 with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge on the 82-inch telescope at McDonald Observatory; in 1965 she also applied successfully to become the first woman permitted to observe at Palomar. Measuring how quickly stars orbited in Andromeda and then in dozens of other spirals, she found that the outer stars moved as fast as the inner ones, which visible mass could not explain. Radio measurements of the 21 centimeter hydrogen line by other astronomers confirmed the result, and the missing mass became known as dark matter.
Rubin spent decades arguing for the inclusion of women in astronomy and mentored many younger researchers. She received the Bruce Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and the National Medal of Science, though many colleagues considered her passed over for the Nobel Prize. She retired from Carnegie in 2014 and died on December 25, 2016. The large survey telescope under construction in Chile was named the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in her honor.