Vera Rubin left us, the astronomer who helped to discover about dark matter

Vera Cooper Rubin was born on Philadelphia, Pensilvania on July 23 in 1928, sadly she left us last 25 of December in Princeton, New Jersey. The North American astronomer obtain a Bachelor of Arts from the Vassar University in the year 1948, she tried to enrol at Princeton University, but she never received her graduate catalogue, as women there were not allowed in the graduate astronomy program until 1975.

However, she applied to be admitted at Cornell University, where she studied physics under the supervision of Philip Morrison, quantum physics under Richard Feynman. After this she got her master in 1951, she would obtained her Ph.D. thesis from Georgetown University, under the supervision of George Gamow. Later Vera Rubin got Honorary degrees at several universities, including Harvard and Yale.

Rubin was a research astronomer at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. She has written as co-author 114 articles of investigation as Peer review. Also she is the author of Bright Galaxies Dark Matters (Masters of Modern Physics) 1996.

Vera was raised on a middle class Jewish family and already at age 10 she got fascinated by the orbit of the stars when she explored the night sky from her bedroom on Washington D.C. and even if her father wasn´t quite convinced about her career inclination for astronomy, he helped her built a telescope and took her to the amateur astronomer reunions. 

Early on she realised of the difficulties laying ahead on the academic world, evident when she told about how her physics professor at secondary school would not pay attention to girls. So that is way she went looking for a more favourable place for her ambitions and that place was Vassar College, located in New York, which stood out for its promotion of woman in all fields of knowledge. 

She finished her PhD thesis on the year 1954 proving that galaxies were grouped together in large associations a work ahead of its time a decade and a half, but that was not sufficient to see it published on the Astrophysical Journal. In 1964 Vera accepted working on the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) of the Washington Carnegie Institution until she was until our days, that same year she was the first woman to legally work at Palomar Observatory. 

But it was the velocities of galaxies and the dark matter what rose Vera Rubin to fame, in 1964 she started a long time collaboration with the astronomer Kent Ford about the velocities of galaxies, coming to the same conclusion as she did on her thesis on her master, but she was forced to leave this field due to a not so favorable atmosphere on this subject, focusing he investigation on the structures of spiral galaxies. 

Finally, these studies will conclude on a systematic study of the rotation curves of different galactic morphologies. What resulted after this investigation was that the rotation curve results will be very similar showing a flattering until distances very far from the centre, implying an only plausible explanation and that is that there was up ten time more invisible matter than the visible one. 

Left: A simulated galaxy without dark matter. Right: Galaxy with a flat rotation curve that would be expected under the presence of dark matter. Wikipedia.

These works would come to give the right to the 1930 studies of Fritz Zwicky about the existence of a great quantity of dark matter in the Universe, been able to prove since the year 1978 that at least 90% of the matter in the Universe is dark, with the study of more than two hundred galaxies. 

Thanks to Rubin´s work, she got awarded almost every honour and merit on astronomy expect the Nobel Price, having died without this deserved honour, despite this Vera is a renowned and prestigious astronomer, no doubt a huge loss to the scientific community 

Fuentes: Wikipedia, IAA-CSIC,

VIDEO: Vera Ruben on "The Astronomer" series 1991, episode 1 - Where is the rest of the Universe?