Vera Florence Cooper Rubin (; July 23, 1928 – December 25, 2016) was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves, the first evidence for the galaxy rotation problem, one key piece of evidence for dark matter. Measurements by other astronomers using 21 centimeter hydrogen line radio telescopes clinched the case.
Honored during her lifetime for her work, she received the Bruce Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the National Medal of Science, among others. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is named in her honor. Her legacy is described by The New York Times as "ushering in a Copernican-scale change" in cosmological theory. Prominent theoretical physicist Lisa Randall and others have argued that Rubin was neglected for the Nobel Prize.
Rubin spent her life advocating for women in science, and mentored aspiring female astronomers.
Vera Cooper was born on July 23, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the younger of two sisters born to a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. Her father, Pesach Kobchefski, immigrated with his mother and three siblings to Gloversville, New York, reuniting with his father who had immigrated a year or two earlier. Pesach soon anglicized his name to Pete Cooper, and as an adult studied electrical engineering and worked at Bell Telephone. He married Rose Applebaum, a second generation American born to a mother who had immigrated from Bessarabia (in present-day Moldova and Ukraine) to Philadelphia. They met at Bell, where Rose worked until they married.
In 1938 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where ten-year-old Vera developed an interest in astronomy while watching the stars from her window. "Even then I was more interested in the question than in the answer," she remembered. "I decided at an early age that we inhabit a very curious world." She built a crude telescope out of cardboard with her father, and began to observe and track meteors. She attended public school at Coolidge Senior High School, graduating in 1944.
Ignoring advice she had received from a high school science teacher to avoid a scientific career and become an artist, the young aspiring astronomer chose instead to pursue her undergraduate education at Vassar College. Vassar, then an all-women's school, was famous for its association with the pioneering 19th century astronomer Maria Mitchell, discoverer of Comet 1847 VI (modern designation C/1847 T1) and a professor at Vassar from the time of the founding of its observatory in 1865.
At Vassar College, Rubin was a member of the honors society Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1948. Despite Vassar's historic reputation for groundbreaking science in the field, Rubin was the only graduate in astronomy that year.
Rubin attempted to enroll in the astronomy program at Princeton, but was barred due to her gender (Princeton would retain the policy of gender discrimination against women in its astronomy department until 1975). She was accepted to Harvard's program, but declined the offer on the basis that she was getting married, and her future husband, a graduate student in physics, was based at Cornell University.
Cornell was not known during this period for the excellence of its astronomy department, composed as it was of only four members. It did, however, boast an excellent physics faculty, and much of the coursework for Rubin's degree was taught within this department. Noted physicist Philip Morrison and future Nobelists Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman worked with Rubin during this period.
At Cornell, she worked with astronomer Martha Carpenter on galactic dynamics and studied the motions of galaxies. From this work, Rubin made one of the first observations of deviations from Hubble flow. Though her conclusions – that there was an orbital motion of galaxies around a particular pole – were later disproven, the idea that galaxies were moving held true and sparked further research. Additionally, Rubin's research provided early evidence of the supergalactic plane.
This information and the data she compiled were controversial for their day. Against her advisors' hesitations, she gained permission to present at the annual meeting of American Astronomical Society. Not only was her material in a form that left it open to speculation that it was premature and incompletely supported, she had given birth to her first child three weeks previously and was not a member of the society. These circumstances did not go unnoticed. Her presentation to the AAS in December 1950 received front page headlines ("Young Mother Has Own Theory of Universe", read the lede, disseminated from an article in the Washington Post). The talk received – to Rubin's personal recollection – universally negative feedback and the paper was not published.
She completed her work at Cornell with the award of her 1951 master's degree.
Rubin studied next at Georgetown University, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1954 (under George Gamow, who was at nearby George Washington University), although much of her classwork was completed with Georgetownian Francis Heyden. Her dissertation, completed in 1954, concluded that galaxies clumped together, rather than being randomly distributed through the universe, a controversial idea not pursued by others for two decades.
For the next decade, Rubin held various short-term academic positions in the greater DC area. She served for a year as an instructor of Mathematics and Physics at Montgomery College, Maryland. Then from 1955 to 1965 she worked at Georgetown University as a research associate astronomer, lecturer (1959–1962), and finally, assistant professor of astronomy (1962–1965).
In the latter position, from 1963, Rubin began a year-long collaboration with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, during which she made her first observations of the rotation of galaxies while using the McDonald Observatory's 82-inch telescope.
She joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington (later called Carnegie Institution of Science) in 1965 as a staff member in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. There she met her long-time collaborator, instrument-maker Kent Ford.
During her work at the Carnegie Institution, Rubin applied to become the first female astronomer permitted to observe at the Palomar Observatory in 1965.
An initiating faculty member of the Vatican Observatory Summer School (1986), Rubin continued this relationship through subsequent decades, providing dedication remarks for the opening of the VATT, the Vatican's telescope on Mount Graham.