I first learned about Vera Cooper Rubin in my Astronomy-105 class, Stars/Galaxies/Cosmology, last semester with Professor Alyssa Sokol. Her extraordinary achievements in a male-dominated field have inspired me as a woman interested in STEM, and I believe more Vassar students should hear her story.
Vera Rubin was born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to parents who worked at the Bell Telephone Company. Her father was an electrical engineer, and her mother was a choir singer. When she was 10, her family moved to Washington, D.C., where she attended middle and high school.
Rubin was interested in science and space from a young age. Her parents supported this interest, which was uncommon for the 1940s due to sexism and gender roles keeping women out of those spaces. Her father helped her create a cardboard telescope, and her mother convinced the librarian to allow Vera to check out adult science books (Dawson). Although she had supportive parents, she experienced sexism from others. Her high school physics teacher doubted her intelligence when she told him she would attend Vassar. He told Rubin, “As long as you stay away from science, you should do OK” . This did not deter her.
Rubin attended Vassar College from 1944 to 1948, when the institution was still an all-women’s college. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy, being the only student in that class to do so. Rubin was inspired by Maria Mitchell, the first female astronomer who taught at Vassar.
While on summer breaks, she worked at the Naval Research Laboratory and the US Naval Observatory. The summer before her senior year at Vassar, she met a physics student named Bob Rubin who was returning to Cornell. By October of the same year, they wrote to their families to let them know they were getting married. After graduating from Vassar, Rubin went to Cornell to complete her Master’s degree while Bob Rubin finished his PhD. She had applied to graduate school at Princeton but was denied for being a woman. So, she ended up at Cornell. The two returned to Washington, DC after completing their respective degrees.
Washington, DC, is where Rubin started her professional career. By the time they moved to DC, the two already had one child and another on the way. This was difficult, but she persevered, as many women with careers have to do. Rubin enrolled in a PhD program at Georgetown University. The classes were taught at night, which was difficult for Rubin while having children, but she made it work with the help of her professor, husband, and parents. By 1954, she had her PhD in Astronomy with a thesis on the nature of the extragalactic universe. Her work was published the same year in the Astrophysical Journal.
This was around the time that Rubin gave birth to her third child. It was difficult for her to stay home as she was a very career-oriented woman. When looking back on this time, Rubin stated, “I realized that as much as we both adored this child, there was nothing in my background that had led me to expect that [my husband] would go off to work each day doing what he loved to do, and I would stay home…I really found it very, very hard”. Her husband supported her and encouraged her to return to school.
Vera Rubin went on to teach courses and do research at Georgetown University for a decade. A year before she departed from Georgetown, she was invited to conduct observations from the Palomar Observatory located in San Diego, California. Women were not usually allowed to use the 200-inch telescope, so Rubin eagerly accepted the opportunity. When given a tour of the facility, it became clear to Rubin that women were truly not welcome since the only bathroom present was designated for men. As a protest, Rubin drew a woman in a skirt and placed it on the door. The next time she returned to the observatory, a gender-neutral bathroom had been added.
After teaching, she took a research position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, making her the first female scientist on the department’s staff. Rubin teamed up with Kent Ford, an astronomer who built an extremely sensitive spectrometer, a machine that measures the amount of light given off by objects. Rubin’s work was largely ignored before she teamed up with Ford, but her partnership with him gained her more respect in the scientific world. They ended up doing extensive work together.
Rubin and Ford published nine papers together. They were able to record the spectroscopic signatures, the unique pattern of electromagnetic radiation emitted or reflected by an object, of tiny portions of distant galaxies. These recordings showed something unexpected that did not align with current theories. They expected stars farther from the galaxy to rotate slower, similar to the rotations seen in the solar system. Instead, the recordings showed that the rate of rotation remained high.
At first, Rubin and Ford did not know what the data meant. Rubin only began to understand the phenomenon when she made sketches. This discovery made Rubin and Ford theorize that there must be an invisible mass causing this phenomenon, now known as dark matter. If a halo of dark matter surrounded each galaxy, the mass would be spread throughout the galaxy rather than concentrated in the center, causing the gravitational force and the orbital speed to be similar. Rubin’s dark matter calculations also showed that galaxies must contain ten times as much “dark” mass as can be accounted for by the mass of visible stars.
Rubin and Ford were not the first to theorize about dark matter, but they were the first to find clear evidence. In 1933, Fritz Zwicky found evidence and theorized about the presence of dark matter. Unfortunately, his work was written off and his colleagues were skeptical. No further information was collected on the topic until Rubin and Ford came along.
This discovery was monumental to the science world. It changed the world’s understanding of the universe. Their discovery of dark matter gave Rubin’s career new life. From 1972 to 1977, Rubin acted as the associate editor of the Astronomical Journal. Afterward, she was the associate editor of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Rubin continued her astronomical research after discovering dark matter and published over 100 scientific papers. She received many accolades for her contributions to the astronomy community, including an election to the National Academy of Science and the National Medal of Science from Bill Clinton. Rubin’s discovery was deserving of a Nobel Prize, but she unfortunately never received one.
Rubin passed on December 25th, 2016, at the age of 88. Her life was full of accomplishments and contributions to society. Many things have been named after he,r including a ridge on Mars, a galaxy, and an observatory in Chile, the first observatory to be named after a woman. Her legacy lives on through her children, all of them holding a doctorate in sciences.
Vera Rubin remains a champion for women in scientific fields, although it was not easy for her. She was often not taken seriously and doubted. If it wasn’t for her tenacity and ability to overcome challenges, advances in astronomy would not be the same. She opened doors for all women and will forever be revered by women in the sciences as a hero. I hope she inspires current Vassar students as she has shown that anything is possible.