Vera Cooper Rubin
| Accomplishments | Currently |
Vera Cooper Rubin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 23, 1928. Her parents were Philip and Rose Cooper. When she was young, she loved stars. Her fascination for them took her to look for answers to questions that most scientists believed were obvious.
After high school, Vera went to Vassar University where she got a bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1948. When she married Bob Rubin, a physicist, she went with him to Cornell University in New York. She completed her Master's degree there in 1951. At this time the big bang theory was becoming widely accepted. Vera challenged the big bang theory when she presented her master's thesis to the American Astronomical Society in which she suggested that galaxies might be rotating around an unknown center, not just expanding out. Because her theory had no evidence to back it up and she was a 22 year old woman, her ideas gained a negative reputation.
Through night classes she obtained her doctorate from Georgetown University in 1954, while her parents took care of her 2 kids and her husband waited in the car since she didn't know how to drive. Her doctorate work showed that galaxies were not evenly distributed in the universe, but that in some areas there are more, and in some there are less. Again this went against the predictions of the big bang theory of an evenly distributed universe.
Vera taught and did research at Georgetown for several years and had 2 more children. During her 10 years at Georgetown, she made observations at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona and Palomar Observatory in California. She was the first woman officially permitted to observe there. In 1965, she joined the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, where she continued her research in spectroscopy and galactic rotations, especially the rotation of spiral galaxies. In the early 1970's, she made another discovery that completely changed our understanding of the universe. Existing laws of gravity predicted that stars on the outside edge of a spiral galaxy would orbit slower than stars in the center of that galaxy; just like planets orbit around the sun. Vera's research proved this wrong. It showed that stars on the outside of a spiral galaxy travel as fast as those orbiting closer to the center. It also suggested that only about 10% of the universe is not made of "dark matter", a substance that scientists today struggle to identify and describe. Vera's work has shown that we still know only a fraction about what the universe is made of.
Spiral Galaxy
Vera is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Astronomical Society, International Astronomical Union, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. She has been active in promoting women in science, and in 1984 she was elected to the Council of the Association for Women in Science. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993. In 1996 she received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, London. She holds honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Michigan, among others. She was appointed to the National Science Board in 1996.
Nowadays, she is an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington for the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.
For more information go to:
http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/Museum/rubinv.html
http://www.vassar.edu/SciWomen/#Rubin/Goldman-Rakic
http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/members/rubin.htm
By: Trini Bruniard