- Person
- Vera Rubin
- Lived
- 1928–2016
- Field
- Astronomy
- From
- American
The story
After graduating from Vassar in 1948, Vera Rubin earned a master's degree at Cornell in 1951 with a bold and controversial study suggesting that galaxies had sideways motions beyond the general expansion of the universe. The paper was received coldly and went unpublished. She then began a PhD at Georgetown University in Washington, supervised by the physicist George Gamow of nearby George Washington University.
Her doctoral thesis, completed in 1954 and published that year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as Fluctuations in the Space Distribution of the Galaxies, asked a simple question: are galaxies spread evenly through space, or not? She was raising small children at the time, and much of her work was done at home.
Her answer was that they are not. Analysing counts of galaxies across the sky, she concluded that they clump together rather than being randomly scattered through the universe. The Jewish Women's Archive describes the thesis as one of the earliest works on the clustering of galaxies. At the time the idea was controversial, and other astronomers did not pursue it for about two decades; large-scale structure was not studied seriously until the late 1970s.
Today, as National Geographic noted, astronomers recognise that the universe is organised into clumps and filaments of galaxies strung together like beads on a vast cosmic web. Mapping that web has become one of the main tools of cosmology, and Rubin's thesis was an early glimpse of it.
The thesis also showed qualities that marked her whole career. She worked carefully with the data available, even when it was thin, and had the confidence to follow it to conclusions that others were not yet ready to accept. The same pattern returned in the 1970s, when her measurements of spinning galaxies showed that much of their mass must be invisible.
Why it matters
The clustering of galaxies that Rubin detected in 1954 is now a key tool for testing theories of dark matter, dark energy and the history of the universe.
About Vera Rubin
Astronomer whose measurements of how galaxies spin gave the first persuasive evidence for dark matter, and a lifelong champion of women in science.
More about Vera Rubin
- Vera Rubin found stars orbiting the wrong wayVera Rubin discovered galaxies in which some stars and gas orbit in the opposite direction to the rest, evidence that galaxies grow by merging with smaller systems.
- Vera Rubin broke the barrier at Palomar ObservatoryIn 1965 Vera Rubin became the first woman permitted to observe at the Palomar Observatory, and when told it had no women's bathroom, she taped a paper skirt to the men's room sign.
- Vera Rubin found the evidence for dark matterMeasuring how fast stars orbit in spiral galaxies, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found that the outer stars move far too fast, persuasive evidence that galaxies are held together by invisible dark matter.
- Vera Rubin was a lifelong champion of women in scienceVera Rubin campaigned for decades to open astronomy to women, saying it was well known that she was available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers.
Sources
- Vera Rubin Wikipedia
- Vera Rubin, Pioneering Astronomer, Dies at 88 National Geographic
- Vera Cooper Rubin Jewish Women's Archive
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.