Vera Rubin

Vera Florence Cooper Rubin (/ˈruːbɪn/; 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. Her work on the galaxy rotation problem produced the first widely accepted evidence for the existence of dark matter.

Honored throughout 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. As recalled by Vera, her father Pesach Kobchefski was born in "Vilna, Latvia" (currently known as Vilnius, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire), and at the age of seven 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 the 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.