Vera Cooper Rubin: Persistent Star Tracker

By Linda Harris Sittig

As a child, I was always fascinated by the stars. But unlike Vera Rubin, I never considered the possibility of studying them. The best I have done is put an app, The Night Sky, on my smartphone.

But Vera Rubin went way beyond my celestial interests. She became one of the premier American astronomers whose work changed our knowledge of the universe.

Never heard of her? That is why I am bringing you her story.

The Early Years

Born in Philadelphia in 1928 to Jewish immigrants, Vera showed a keen curiosity even as a child. When Vera was ten, the family moved to Washington D.C., and she slept facing a north window. One night she awoke to discover that the stars had moved! Wondering about this revelation, she decided she needed a telescope.

So, she convinced her father to help her build one. Crudely fashioned out of an industrial cardboard tube, Vera marveled at what she found in the inky darkness of the night sky.

Encouraged by her parents, she excelled at school and won a scholarship to attend prestigious Vassar College. Her high school physics teacher commented that she would probably be okay if she didn’t try to study science.

Wow, did she prove him wrong! She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 from Vassar–the only astronomy major in her graduating class. Next, she applied to Princeton University for graduate school but was denied due to her gender.

Hmm. Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar but can’t get into Princeton because she is female.

She married Robert Rubin, whom she met during a summer job at the Naval Research Laboratory, and joined him at graduate school at Cornell University.

While at Cornell, she completed her master’s thesis and became pregnant with her first child. Before the baby’s birth, Vera planned to talk about her research to the American Astronomical Society. But her advisor suggested that since she was heavily pregnant, he could present her research instead.

She declined his offer and gave a ten-minute talk on the velocity distribution of the galaxies. The members of the Society were polite but somewhat skeptical of her data, even though Vera had studied the motions of 109 separate galaxies. She had already observed firsthand the deviations of how those galaxies move apart from one another.

Vera, now 23 with a degree in Astronomy from Vassar and a Master of Science from Cornell, became a new mother. For the next 18 months, she stayed home, taking her baby to the park and reading Astrophysical Journal while he napped.

But she wasn’t content. In 1952, with her husband’s encouragement, she applied for a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Georgetown University. Classes were twice a week, at night. Fortunately, Vera’s mother took care of the baby.

The Working Years

Now armed with a Ph.D., she continued her research on galaxies. In 1954 she submitted her doctorate research which concluded that galaxies were clumped together rather than randomly distributed in the universe. She sent the work to the Astrophysical Journal for publication, but her paper was rejected. Once again undeterred, she published her findings instead in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It wasn’t long afterward that Georgetown offered Vera a research spot which eventually led to a teaching position she kept for ten years.

In 1962 Vera and six of her graduate students worked together on a paper. Their research centered on if cataloged stars could determine the rotation curve for stars distant from the center of our galaxy.

Once again, she submitted the paper to the Astrophysical Journal. This time the editor agreed to publish the work, BUT without giving the names of the student researchers. Vera replied that she would then withdraw the paper. The editor finally changed his mind, and the report was published.

In 1964 Bob took a sabbatical and, with their four children in tow, Vera and Bob headed to San Diego, California. Once there, she worked with Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, two renowned astronomers. Together, they took her to observatories in Arizona and Texas. Vera remembered most of that year because Margaret Burbidge inspired her to continue pursuing science.

A year later and back home in Washington D.C., Vera was invited by noted astronomer Allan Sandage to visit the Palomar Mountain 200-inch telescope. This site had previously been ‘off limits’ to female scientists.

She was thrilled. This was the same telescope that Fritz Zwicky had used in 1933 when he made his startling discovery that later would be identified as ‘black matter’ in space.

However, on her first day at the Palomar, Vera noticed there was only one bathroom, labeled MEN. The next day she arrived with a cutout silhouette of a woman and pasted it next to the sign for MEN. It was probably the first time a woman scientist had created a unisex bathroom.

In 1965 Vera joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington and met the man who would become her long-term collaborator, Kent Ford. Together, they worked on the controversial subject of galaxy clusters with Ford’s creation of an image tube spectrograph.

Now able to see astronomical objects previously too dim to analyze, Vera turned her research focus to study the rotation of the outer reaches of the galaxies. She found that the stars in the outmost regions of galaxies were moving as quickly as those in the center of the galaxy.

Previously, the accepted belief was that in a spiral galaxy like ours, the Milky Way, the core has the highest concentration of stars. However, when the stars of the outer region were traveling as quickly as the stars of the inner part, there had to be a reason. The only explanation for these flat rotation curves had to be a tremendous amount of unseen black matter in the outer regions. Vera’s initial calculations showed that almost 90 percent of galactic mass was invisible to us. (Today, scientists accept that 84 percent is the accepted calculation.)

The stars that we see are from the inner regions of our galaxy, and most of the mass of our universe is hidden from our view. And this, according to the scientific community, is one of the most significant paradigm shifts in astrophysics. It is known as the Rubin-Ford Effect.

Her STEM Legacy

Looking back over Vera’s legacy, I found that she wrote books, published over 150 scientific papers, and garnered many awards. And she became an associate editor for the Astrophysical Journal – yes, the same publication that had rejected her research paper in 1954.

In 1993 Vera Rubin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the second woman astronomer in its ranks. And presently, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is being constructed on a mountain in Chile to focus on the dark matter of space.

She has an asteroid named after her, a ridge on Mars is called the Vera Rubin Ridge, and an American satellite launched in 2020 carries her name.

While 218 people have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics since 1901, only four have been women. And Vera Rubin was not one.

Since she died in 2016 at 88, a Nobel Prize will never be hers. And while that accolade would have been deserving, Vera often said her life goal was to encourage other women to enter scientific fields.

Vera was a scientist and an activist in gender equality. She lived her life with fierce persistence, undeterred by criticism, and her passion for understanding the stars reached a worldwide audience.

All four of her children earned Ph.D.s in the natural sciences or math.

I hope you enjoyed Vera Rubin’s inspirational story. This month’s blog was longer than usual, because I consulted numerous scientific publications about Vera’s life.  And I upped my learning curve! Thank you to Symmetry Magazine: Dimension of Particle Physics, Astronomy.com, Physics World, National Science Foundation, and Cosmic Horizons: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge for their published information on Vera Rubin.

Please share this month’s blog to encourage STEM education for girls. Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.

~ Linda