Review

Astronomer from the United States, pioneer in measuring the rotation of stars within a galaxy, discovered that the velocities did not fit Newton's gravitational theory. Her work provided the first evidence for the existence of dark matter, which was confirmed in the following decades.

She graduated in astronomy from Vassar College. Later, she pursued graduate studies at Cornell University and Georgetown University, where she provided evidence for the existence of galactic superclusters. She showed that galaxies grouped in large associations. She was the first woman to legally use the Palomar Observatory telescope. Rubin spent her life advocating for women in science and was known for mentoring aspiring female astronomers.

Activities

Spanish

• Gráfica de rotación de galaxias y velocidad del movimiento circular
  • Spain > Physics and chemistry > 4th ESO > Interaction

Justifications

• Their calculations provided evidence for the existence of dark matter, showing that galaxies must ultimately contain ten times more dark mass and can be accreted by visible stars.
• Her research suggested that Newtonian gravity does not apply universally in a large halo of matter surrounding galaxies.
• Feminist activist and advocate for the presence of women in astronomy.

Biography

Vera Cooper Rubin was an astronomer from the United States a pioneer in measuring the rotation of stars within a galaxy. Her measurements revealed that the galactic rotation curves remained flat, contradicting the theoretical model, providing the most direct and robust evidence for the existence of dark matter.

Vera Rubin was born Vera Florence Cooper on July 23, 1928, in Philadelphia, United States. She was the youngest of two sisters. Her parents were Jewish immigrants: Philip Cooper, a Polish-American electrical engineer who worked at Bell Telephone, and Rose Applebaum Cooper, who was originally from Bessarabia and had worked at Bell before her marriage. Her father was born in Vilna, Lithuania (until 1945 the city was Polish), as Pesach Kobchefski.

The Cooper family moved to Washington DC in 1938, where Vera, at the age of 10, developed an interest in astronomy by observing the stars from her window. She and her father built a crude cardboard telescope, and she began observing and tracking meteors. She attended Coolidge Senior High School, graduating in 1944.

Vera received a scholarship to study at Vassar College, where Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), the first professional astronomer in the United States, had been a professor. In 1947, she met Robert (Bob) Rubin, the son of family friends, who was studying at Cornell University. The following year, just after graduating from Vassar, Vera and Bob got married. Their marriage would last 60 years until his death. Vera applied to Princeton University but was rejected because they still did not accept women in the field of astronomy. Ultimately, Vera decided to enrol at Cornell, where her husband was studying. At that university, Martha Stahr Carpenter (1920-2013), the only professor at Cornell University who specialised in galaxy dynamics, taught there. This would influence the topic Vera chose for her master's thesis. She obtained her doctorate in 1954 at Georgetown University with a thesis on the rotation of galaxies. She showed that galaxies were grouped in large associations. Vera continued teaching and researching at Georgetown for ten years.

In 1964, she accepted a position offered to her in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution, where she worked until her retirement. In 1964, she became the first woman to legally use the Palomar Observatory telescope. She arrived at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at Carnegie in Washington, DC, in 1965. Rubin's interest in how stars orbit their galactic centres led her and her colleague Kent Ford (b. 1931) to study the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, a nearby spiral. The two scientists aimed to determine the distribution of mass in M31 by observing the orbital velocities of stars and gas at different distances from the galactic center. They expected the velocities to follow Newton's gravitational theory, according to which an object farther from its central mass orbits slower than those closer to it. To their surprise, they discovered that stars farther from the centre travelled as fast as those near the centre.

After observing dozens of galaxies in the 1970s, Rubin and her colleagues discovered that something beyond the visible mass was responsible for the movement of the stars. Each spiral galaxy is embedded in a "halo" of dark matter, a material that does not emit light and extends beyond the optical galaxy. They found that it contains 5 to 10 times more mass than the visible galaxy.

As a result of Rubin's groundbreaking work, it has become evident that more than 80 percent of the universe is made up of this invisible matter. The first hint of the existence of dark matter came in 1933 when Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky from Caltech proposed it. However, it was not until Rubin's work and that of her colleagues that observational evidence for the existence of dark matter was confirmed

In 1993, Rubin received the National Medal of Science, the most prestigious scientific award in the country. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1981, and in 1996, she became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society since Caroline Herschel, who received the award in 1828.

She co-authored 114 research papers and was also the author of Bright Galaxies Dark Matters (Masters of Modern Physics). She received numerous awards and honors.

Rubin spent her life advocating for women in science and was known for mentoring aspiring female astronomers.

Works

Bibliography

Mitton, Jacqueline; Mitton, Simon (2021). Vera Rubin: A Life. Harvard: Belknap Press

"Remembering Vera Rubin" (23-07-2021), en Carnegie Science,  (13-11-2022), <https://carnegiescience.edu/news/remembering-vera-rubin>

Didactic approach

In physics and chemistry, in the study of motion, forces, and gravitation.

In mathematics, in the study of function graphs.

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