Vera Rubin

Vera Rubin was an American astronomer and astrophysicist who confirmed the existence of dark matter.

• Rubin was born on July 23, 1928, Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. Her father, Philip Cooper, was an electrical engineer, and her mother, Rose Applebaum, worked for Bell Telephone Company.
• Her older sister, Ruth Cooper Burg, was an administrative judge in the United States Department of Defense.
• Growing up, Rubin was always fond of astronomy. She received her bachelor's degree in astronomy from Vassar College. She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, for her Master's degree in Science. (She initially wanted to enroll at Princeton, but Princeton didn't allow women in their graduate astronomy program until 1975.)

• At Cornell, she studied under well-respected, veteran scientists like Richard Feynman, Philip Morrison, and Hans Bethe. She received the degree from Cornell in 1951 and then attended Georgetown University, where she did her doctoral work under George Gamow.
• In her Ph.D. thesis at Georgetown University, she concluded that galaxies clumped together, rather than being randomly distributed through the universe. Unfortunately, her hypothesis was not well received at the time by her peers. After receiving her degree in 1954 from Georgetown University, she worked on the University faculty for several years.
• In 1965, Rubin began to work at Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C where she reconnected with her friend, Kent Ford, a fellow astronomer, and instrument maker. Rubin then worked with Ford, who used his advanced spectrometer in their study of space and matter. The spectrometer allowed them to drastically change the way the dark matter was viewed. The Rubin–Ford effect is named after them. The effect describes the motion of the Milky Way relative to a sample of galaxies at distances of about 150 to 300 Mly, and suggests that it is different from the Milky Way's motion relative to the cosmic microwave background radiation.
• In 1965, Rubin became the first woman to be authorized to use the instruments at the Palomar Observatory. Incidentally, the building had no women's restroom.
• While working on her chosen subject, in 1970, she discovered a compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter. Earlier, in 1933, a Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky had proposed the idea of the existence of dark matter, but it was not confirmed due to lack of substantial evidence. Now it's believed that more than 90 percent of the universe is composed of dark matter, which remains invisible and unidentified.
• In 1992, Rubin discovered a galaxy (NGC 4550) in which half the stars in the disk are orbiting in one direction and the other half in the opposite, with the two systems intermingled.

Vera was married in 1948 to Robert Rubin, whom she had met at Cornell University. Her husband supported her in her struggle as a woman scientist in those times. Robert died in 2008. Their four children received Ph.D.s in the natural sciences or mathematics. Rubin encouraged her daughters to pursue their dreams of studying the universe.

Rubin died on December 25, 2016 of natural causes.

Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the first woman to be honored after Caroline Herschel in .
Weizmann Women & Science Award
Gruber International Cosmology Prize
Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences
Richtmyer Memorial Award
Dickson Prize for Science
National Medal of Science
Adler Planetarium Lifetime Achievement Award
Member of the National Academy of Sciences
Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
Member of the American Philosophical Society
Henry Norris Russell Lectureship before the American Astronomical Society

Famous words

In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of ten. That's probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance-to-knowledge. We're out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade. -- Vera Rubin

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

In my own life, my science and my religion are separate. I'm Jewish, and so religion to me is a kind of moral code and a kind of history. I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe. -- Vera Rubin