Vera Florence Cooper Rubin
Personal Information
Born: 1928
Died: 2016
Country of Birth: USA
Nationality: USA
Ethnicity: White
Education
Vassar College BA Astronomy 1948; Cornell University MS Physics 1951; Georgetown University PhD Astronomy
""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 Florence Cooper Rubin
Professional Life
Field of Study: Astronomy
Institution/Corporation: Georgetown University; Carnegie Institution of Washington (now Carnegie Institute of Science)
Degrees & Memberships: Honorary Degree: Harvard University Yale University Smith College Grinnell College Georgetown University Princeton University (2005); Member: Phi Beta Kappa National Academy of Science (1981) Pontifical Academy of Sciences American Philosophical Society
Awards & Achievements
Awards: Bruce Medal; Dickson Prize for Science; 1996 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society; 1993 National Medal of Science; a nebula research fund observatory in Chile prizes awards a ridge on Mars an asteroid & a satellite are named after her; 1996 Weitzman Women & Science Award; 2002 Gruber International Cosmology Prize; 2003 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal Astronomical Society of the Pacific; 2004 James Craig Watson Medal National Academy of Sciences; Richtmyer Memorial Award; Adler Planetarium Lifetime Achievement Award; Jansky Lectureship National Radio Astronomy Observatory; 1994 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship American Astronomical Society
Achievements: Galaxy rotation problem; dark matter; Rubin-Ford effect (now known as large scale streaming); research on spiral galaxies & flat rotation curves
Pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates
With Kent Ford, discovered outer stars in a spiral galaxy rotate as quickly as those at the center
Helped establish the importance of dark matter in the universe
Her calculations showed galaxies must contain approximately 10 times as much "dark" mass as can be accounted for by the visible stars
At an early age built a telescope out of cardboard with her father & began to observe & track meteors
After graduating Vassar in 1948, attempted to enroll in a graduate program at Princeton but was barred because she was female; Princeton didn't accept females in graduate astronomy program until 27 years later
During her graduate studies at Cornell, she studied the motions of 109 galaxies & made one of the 1st observations of deviations from Hubble Flow
Her research provided early evidence of the supergalactic plane
Throughout her graduate studies she encountered sexism; at one point she wasn't allowed to meet with her advisor in his office because women weren't allowed in that area of the Catholic university
1st female astronomer to observe at the palomar Observatory (1965); had to create her own restroom as there were no facilities for women
1992, discovered galaxy NGC4550; half the stars orbit in one direction & half in the other with both systems intermingled