She actively promoted women in science and encouraged girls to become scholars. She showed that scientific work was not defined by gender or gender, but she also said, “… my numbers mean a lot more than my name. If astronomers use my data in the future, that would be my greatest praise. ”
She was the first woman allowed to make observations from the famous Palomar Observatory – the same one Fritz Zwicky himself used when observing the Coma cluster and coming to the first conclusions about anomalies of galaxy rotations. However, the only toilet in the observatory reads “Men.” So Vera drew a woman in a skirt and strapped it to the toilet door.
Thanks to the work of Vera Rubin, we have learned a lot about galaxies and our view of the universe has changed. Rubin pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. Her research data provided some of the first known evidence for dark matter which had previously been theorized by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s.
Rubin´s research uncovered a discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion by studying galactic rotation curves, a phenomenon that became known as the galaxy rotation problem and was evidence of the existence of dark matter. In simple terms, if gravity is what holds the galaxies together, it would mean that there is something else, a large amount of some invisible matter that holds the galaxies in place because gravity from the detectable mass is not sufficient enough to do that.
All of this has led to the hypothesis that there is some “unseen mass” in the cosmos  and this  mass is callled “dark matter” by scientists. To date, it has not been confirmed whether dark matter exists because it is difficult to detect it, both directly and indirectly. Still, Rubin’s contribution to galaxy rotation research is immense and it is a great injustice that she did not win the Nobel Prize.
Some would perhaps say that Rubin shouldn´t even be considered to win the Nobel Prize because the existence of dark matter hasn´t been confirmed. However, Rubin´s work on the galaxy rotation problem should suffice. In 2019, The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to James Peepbles for creating a model for the evolution of the universe and a standard cosmological model according to which the mysterious form of matter is dominant in the universe – dark matter. All this relied on the work of Vera Rubin. Today, our understanding of the universe is that only about 20% of the universe makes known and visible matter to us – for the rest we do not know what is true.

Life

Faith Florence Cooper Rubin was born on July 23, 1928 in Philaladelphia, Pennsylvania, into a family of Jewish immigrants. Her father, Pesach Kobchefski, was born in Vilnius, Latvia, then part of Poland. He came to the US as a boy of seven years. Her mother, Rose Applebaum Cooper, originates in present-day Moldova-Ukraine (Bessarabia). She came to New York with her family when she was 16 years old.
Rubin later recalled how much she loved nature and how she wanted to understand how things worked. Her father helped her make her first telescope and that’s when her journey into the world of astronomy began. She was quoted in an interview as saying that when she was 12, she preferred to look through at the stars through her telescope rather than go to sleep.
However, as early as high school, she encountered discrimination against women and skepticism about women’s ability. Her physics professor didn’t know what to do with the girls in the class and, as Vera wrote, he decided to ignore them. Rubin remembers one occasion  he was saying that there were two types of discoveries – one that comes from the brilliance of the mind, and here he cites examples of men, and others that come from hard work, but not from brilliance and talent, and his example for that was Marie Curie. On the day she was admitted to Vassar College on an academic scholarship, that same professor told her “you’ll be fine, just stay away from science.”
Rubin was keen to enroll in a graduate program at Princeton but was barred due to her gender. In fact, it would take another 27 years for Princeton to accept women as astronomy graduate students. Rubin turned down an offer from Harvard University due to her husband´s position as a graduate student at Cornell University. Rubin therefore enrolled at Cornell University, earning a master´s degree in 1951. During her graduate studies, Rubin studied the motions of 109 galaxies and made on of the first observations of deviations from Hubble flow or, in layman´s terms, how the galaxies move apart from one another. Though the conclusion that Rubin reached, namely that there was orbital motion of galaxies around a particular pole was disproven, the idea that galaxies were moving held true and inspired further research. Rubin´s research also provided some of the earliest evidence of the supergalactic plane although the data she discovered was extremely controversial. Rubin fought to present her work at the American Astronomical Society but was summarily rejected and her paper was soon forgotten.
Rubin studied for her Ph.D at Georgetown Univeristy, the only university in Washington D.C, that offered a graduate degree in astronomy. Rubin was 23 years old and pregnant with her second child when she began her doctoral studies. Her dissertation concluded that galaxies clumped together, rather than being distributed randomly through the universe proved controversial and the idea was not pursued for another twenty years. Throughout Rubin´s academic career she, like most women of that era, experienced discouraging sexism, including an incident where she was apparently not allow to meet with her advisor in his office because women weren´t allowed in that part of the university.
She held various academic position for the next decade and in 1965 she joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington as a staff member. It was at the Carnegie Institute she met instrument maker Kent Ford who became her long-time collaborator. Combining her research with motherhood, Rubin often worked from home. Rubin began work related to her controversial thesis regarding galaxy clusters and using Ford´s image-tube spectrograph, began making hundreds of observations. The spectrograph, an image intensifier, allowed the observation of astronomical objects that were previously too dim for spectral analysis to be carried out. The Rubin-Ford effect, an anistropy in the expansion of the Universe on the scale of 100 million light years was discovered through studies of spiral galaxies. First appearing in 1976, this idea of a peculiar motion was highly controversial and was dismissed at the time but was ultimately shown to be valid. Wishing to avoid contentious research areas, Rubin began studying galaxy rotation and outer reaches of galaxies.

Rotation of galaxies

Legend has it, and to Rubin´s recollection, that it was on a dry Arizona night with the sky full of stars and ideal for observation. Rubin and Ford were watching the stars of the Andromeda  and Vera had doubts about eating ice cream and developing some film taken by Ford. That was the night they made the first observations that allowed them to determine the rate of rotation of galaxies around their center. At that time – in the late 1960s – the rotation of galaxies was still much of a mystery.

Unfortunately, even today, not many people know that galaxies rotate. This is how we learn that planets move around the Sun, but imagine the sun standing as if it were pinned to some point and a certain point in the cosmos. Well, not so – except that the Sun rotates in a twist around its axis, it rotates along with the entire Milky Way, and so do we with our Sun.

We need to know something that wasn’t known in Rubin´s time: plenty of galaxies are moving away from each other. Namely, the universe is expanding and, as it expands, it is logical that galaxies are moving away. However, the Andromeda is approaching our galaxy and it is estimated that the collision of these two galaxies will occur in some 3.75 billion years. Why is Andromeda approaching our galaxy? Rubin’s observations offered some explanation.

After that first night of observation, Rubin and colleagues were amazed at the shape of the galaxy’s rotational curve. The rotation curve was straight, meaning that the stars in the outer spirals of the galaxy were orbiting at the same speed as the stars near the center. Even more alarming, the stars in the outer spirals were in orbit so fast that they needed to separate, but that didn’t happen! The mass of visible stars was not enough to hold the galaxy together. It was as if some of the mass needed for this was missing in the whole thing.

>Unfortunately, even today we do not know what that mass is. It is so obscure to us that we have called it “dark matter.” Scientific institutions and laboratories do a lot to understand what this is all about. Even CERN is in a race to find what makes dark matter. Andromeda became the first of many galaxies with unexplained rotational curves, which Rubin observed with Ford and was later confirmed to have something “missing.” The cosmos was filled with dark matter.

Being a woman in science

She actively promoted women in science and encouraged girls to become scholars. She showed that scientific work was not defined by gender or gender, but she also said, “… my numbers mean a lot more than my name. If astronomers use my data in the future, that would be my greatest praise. ”

She was the first woman allowed to make observations from the famous Palomar Observatory – the same one Fritz Zwicky himself used when observing the Coma cluster and coming to the first conclusions about anomalies of galaxy rotations. However, the only toilet in the observatory reads “Men.” So Vera drew a woman in a skirt and strapped it to the toilet door.

 

Vera Rubin, work by Jelena Kalinić

The legacy of Vera Rubin

Rubin continued her research by discovering evidence for the potential presence of dark matter in numerous galaxies.
In recognition of her contributions to astronomy, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981, and in 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Science Medal. On December 20, 2019 the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed the National Science Foundation Vera C. Rubin Observatory in recognition of Rubin´s contribution to the study of dark matter and her outspoke advocacy for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.
Rubin passed away on Christmas Day, December 25, 2016, at the age of 88. Her name will remain remembered as part of the morphology of the solar system: there is the Vera Rubin Ridge at the Gale Crater on Mars and the asteroid, 5726 Rubin, named in her honor. Her four children have inherited her interest in science and have PhDs in natural sciences or mathematics.
Rubin remains an idol for generations of women interested in science.
Also read something from the memory of Vera Rubin in her text “An Interesting Voyage“.
This text was produced with the support of the United States Embassy in BiH as part of the “U.S. Scientists Who Changed the World” project and we thank the US Embassy.
Translated by Jonas Helgason
  Author:

Jelena Kalinić, MA in comparative literature and graduate biologist, science journalist and science communicator, has a WHO infodemic manager certificate and Health metrics Study design & Evidence based medicine training. Winner of the 2020 EurekaAlert (AAAS) Fellowship for Science Journalists. Short-runner, second place in the selection for European Science journalist of the year for 2022.