Vera Cooper Rubin, 2004 Women of Discovery Air & Space Award

"Don't quit. You can do it." — Vera Cooper Rubin

Astronomer

Born: 1928-01-01

Hometown: Philadelphia, PA

Education: PhD in Astronomy

Achievements

Discoveries: Discovering that most of the matter in the universe is "dark matter."

Expeditions: Into space, using telescopes in the USA and Chile. Also, visited astronomers and telescopes at the South Pole.

Biography

Vera Cooper Rubin, the second daughter of Philip and Rose Cooper, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 23, 1928. As a child she exhibited a naive fascination for the stars which later, as an astronomer, would motivate her to pursue answers to questions that most scientists believed were obvious. Research she contributed to the study of the universe has disproved previously accepted theories and has left scientists struggling with the most baffling questions yet.

Vera graduated from Vassar College in 1948 with a bachelors degree in Astronomy and accompanied her new husband Bob Rubin, a physicist, to Cornell University. She completed her Master's degree there in 1951. At this time the Big Bang theory was becoming widely accepted. Vera presented her master's thesis to the American Astronomical Society in which she suggested that galaxies might be rotating around an unknown center, not just expanding out as described in the Big Bang theory. There was no scientific theory to explain this finding and as a 22 year old woman her ideas quickly earned a her negative reputation.

She completed her doctorate at Georgetown University in 1954 by taking night classes while her parents watched her 2 children and her husband waited in the car as Vera did not know how to drive. Her doctorate work showed that galaxies were not evenly distributed in the universe, but that in some areas there are more, and in some there are less. Again this went against the predictions of the big bang theory of an evenly distributed universe. ( More research gave her observations validity 15 years later.)

Vera taught and did research at Georgetown for several years and had 2 more children. Then in 1965 she got a job working for the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, part of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. She is an astronomer there today. By examining the spectra, or light signatures of galaxies, she made another discovery in the early 1970's that altered dramatically our understanding of the universe. Newtonian laws of gravity predict that stars on the outside edge of a spiral galaxy would orbit slower than stars in the center of that galaxy, like planets orbiting around the sun. Vera's research shows that they do not. Stars orbiting the outside of a spiral galaxy travel just as fast as those orbiting closer to the center. As a result of her unexpected finding, scientists now believe that there is some huge, invisible mass exerting the gravitational force necessary for those outer stars to stay in orbit. Vera Rubin's research suggests that at least 90% of the universe is made of "dark matter," a substance that scientists today struggle to identify and describe. Rubin's work has shown that we still know only a fraction about what the universe is made of.

Rubin is an observational astronomer who studies the motions of gas and stars in galaxies as well as the motions of galaxies in the universe. Rubin's studies played a significant role in the discovery of a previously unknown feature of the universe now known as dark matter, which constitutes at least 90% of the universe. Since 1978, Rubin and her team have analyzed more than 200 galaxies. Among her awards are the 1993 National Medal of Science. In 1996 she was only the second woman to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (London). The first gold medal was awarded to Caroline Herschel in 1828. Rubin is the author of, "Bright Galaxies Dark Matters." 

(Biography from the San Jose State University Virtual Museum website; http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/Museum/aamenu.html )

Fun Facts

Favorite Item to have in the field: A telescope

Heroes: Maria Mitchell, 1818-1888, the first US woman astronomer