Vera Rubin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but moved to DC at a young age. She had an interest in space from a young age, which her parents fostered and supported 

Rubin went on to receive her undergraduate, graduate and doctorate degrees in astronomy 

Through her research, Rubin was able to prove the existence of dark matter. 

“Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting. You can do it, too. … Each one of you can change the world, for you are made of star stuff, and you are connected to the universe,” Vera Rubin, May 17, 1996 Berkeley commencement speech

Early Life

Vera Rubin was born on July 23rd, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Eastern European Jewish parents Phillip and Rose Cooper. She was their second child as the Cooper’s had an older daughter, Ruth. Both of the Coopers worked at Bell Telephone Company in Philadelphia, where they also met. When Rubin was 10, her family moved to Washington, DC, where she completed her secondary schooling. Throughout her early educational journey, her parents fostered her love of science. Rubin’s father assisted her with the construction of a cardboard telescope so that she could photograph the motion of stars, and her mother persuaded the local librarian to permit her to check out adult science books (Childers 2019). 

Rubin’s childhood love of science was not a fleeting fixation, but instead the foundation of her life’s work. She graduated high school in 1944 and, having long since been inspired by the first U.S. female astronomer Maria Mitchell, who taught at Vassar College in New York, she went on to attend Vassar later that year (Jepsen 2020). When she told her high school physics teacher she would be attending Vassar, he doubted her prowess, telling Rubin “As long as you stay away from science, you should do OK,” (Scoles 2016). Rubin majored in astronomy, and was the only student at the all-women's school to do so (Childers 2019). 

While on summer breaks, she worked summers at both the Naval Research Laboratory and the US Naval Observatory (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 2021). The summer of 1947, she met Cornell physics student and future husband, Bob Rubin. The pair married in the fall of that same year and, in spring of 1948, Rubin received her degree from Vassar. She applied for graduate school at Princeton, though she was denied due to being a woman (Childers 2019).

Bob was in the Navy’s V-12 program, which stationed those enlisted at universities to learn useful skills. After graduating, Rubin went to join her husband at Cornell. She spoke highly of her experience there, remarking that “Cornell was a very exciting place because of the physics,” (Wilensky 2021). In 1951, she earned a master’s degree from Cornell while her husband received his PhD (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 2021). Following graduation, Bob was hired by the National Bureau of Standards. The pair returned to Washington, DC, where Rubin embarked on a fruitful - though challenging - professional journey.

Further Academic and Professional Pursuits

By the time the Rubins had moved to Washington, DC, they already had one child and another on the way. She briefly took time off to care for her first-born son, David, but remained deeply invested in science. Rubin reflected on this period of her life and wrote: “I would push David to the playground, sit him in the sandbox, and read the Astrophysical Journal,” (Jepsen 2020). With the continued support and encouragement of her husband, she decided to return to school. She was accepted into Georgetown University’s astronomy PhD program, which was one of the only programs in the area to offer night courses (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 2021). This best suited her busy schedule as a mother, though between 1952-1954, much of Bob and her parents' support was needed while she conducted her research (Jepsen 2020).

In 1950, Rubin gave a talk at the American Astronomical Society regarding her master’s thesis entitled “Rotation of the Universe”. She discussed the velocity distribution of galaxies, and received largely negative commentary from the wholly male attendees (Scoles 2016). However, this talk garnered the attention of theoretical physicist and cosmologist George Gamow. Gamow’s research is considered to be foundational in the world of physics, specifically his work on helping to develop the Big Bang Theory. He reached out to Rubin, asking question after question. One stuck out to her: “Is there a scale length in the distribution of galaxies?” and she decided to conduct the research to answer that question through her doctorate thesis (Jepsen 2020). Ultimately, Gamow became her thesis advisor. She received her PhD and completed her thesis “on the nature of the extragalactic universe” in 1954 (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 2021). Her work was then published that same year in the Astrophysical Journal.

Rubin struggled after the birth of her third child. Tasked with staying home, her reality was much different than the one she had envisioned: conducting scientific research. She once reflected on this period, stating “I realized that as much as we both adored this child, there was nothing in my background that had led me to expect that [my husband] would go off to work each day doing what he loved to do, and I would stay home…I really found it very, very hard,” (Scoles 2016). Bob encouraged her to return to school once more. By1955, Rubin was hired on by Georgetown University to both do research and teach. She worked there for a decade. 

A year prior to Rubin’s final year of teaching, she was invited by astronomer Allan Sandage to conduct observations from the Palomar Observatory located in San Diego, California. Women were prohibited from utilizing the 200-inch telescope, which prompted Rubin to eagerly accept the opportunity. When given a tour of the facility, it became clear that women were truly not welcome when she observed that the only bathroom present was designated for men. In an act of defiance, she Rubin drew a woman in a skirt and placed it on the door. The next time she returned, “heating had been added to the observing room, along with a gender-neutral bathroom,” (Jepsen 2020).

In 1965, she began work at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, DC. Rubin was the first female scientist on the department’s staff. Throughout her career, Rubin faced various obstacles due to sexist views on women in science. In fact, “her master's thesis on the large-scale motions of galaxies was controversial. Her doctoral thesis was largely ignored,” (Childers 2019). However, her ideas began to take off on a larger scale when she collaborated with astronomer Kent Ford. Ford “built the most sensitive spectrometer in existence to measure how much light different objects gave off at different wavelengths (or colors),” (Rubin Observatory). The pair used his spectrograph on a telescope located at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which enabled them to observe objects that had once gone undetected (Jepsen 2020). That was just the beginning of their work together.

The Mother of Dark Matter: A Defining Discovery

As Ford and Rubin continued to work together, their findings resulted in the pair publishing nine papers. Their ultimate discovery was once touched upon by Swiss astronomer, Fritz Zwicky, who first proposed the existence of the substance called “dark matter” in 1933 (Childers 2019). He observed the motion of galaxies in the Coma Cluster (a cluster of over 1000 galaxies), and noticed that galaxies that should have flown apart from each other did not. Zwicky concluded that something that cannot be seen must have been holding them together. Struggling to find further evidence to support this claim, the scientific community overlooked his work (Childers 2019).

When the Rubin and Ford worked together though, they compiled ample data at the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona. Rubin and Ford were able to detect the rotations of distant galaxies. In galaxies like our Milky Way, stars orbit the center of the galaxy. Rubin and Ford tracked the rotation of stars around the center of distant galaxies, and expected the stars farther from the center of the galaxy to rotate slower. Instead, the stars were rotating just as fast as those near the center, so fast that Rubin and Ford determined there must be an “invisible” mass present causing the speed – what we now call “dark matter” (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 2021).

This process was not as simple as merely compiling the evidence. It took months to understand what their data actually meant, and it was not until Rubin made sketches of their findings that the answer (dark matter) became clear. In the years following, physicists such as Jeremiah Ostriker and James Peebles worked to develop a theoretical understanding of dark matter (Scoles 2016). Their work aided in solidifying Rubin and Ford’s research as a part of scientific canon. In the many years following these discoveries, “…scientists have figured out that dark matter makes up more than 80% of all the matter in the Universe,” (Rubin Observatory). 

Rubin and Ford’s discovery was groundbreaking in and of itself, but also in the various subfields it created that further explore astrophysics and particle physics (Schudel 2016). This discovery also breathed new life into Rubin’s career. From 1972 to 1977, she was the associate editor of the Astronomical Journal. Then, from 1977 to 1982, she was the associate editor of Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Life and Legacy

Rubin remained active in astronomical research decades after her big discovery. Over the span of her career, she published more than 100 scientific papers (Schudel 2016). In recognition of her contributions to astronomy, she was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1981. She also won various awards. In 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Science, and in 1994 she received the Dickson Prize in Science from Carnegie-Mellon University and the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship from the American Astronomical Society (Jepsen 2020). 

Additionally, in 1996 she became the second woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, and in 1996 President Clinton nominated her as a member of the National Science Board (Jepsen 2020). In 2004, Rubin was awarded the James Craig Watson Medal by the National Academy of Sciences for her work on dark matter and mentorship of aspiring astronomers.  

Her husband, Bob, passed away in 2008. Rubin died eight years later on December 25th, 2016, in Princeton, New Jersey— she was 88 years old. Prior to her passing, she lived in an assisted living facility and battled dementia (Schudel 2016). Rubin’s legacy is not only solidified by her scientific findings, but through many other honors. A ridge on Mars has been named after her, as well as an asteroid, a satellite, a galaxy, and the National Science Foundation’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Notably, this is the first national observatory named after a woman (Wilensky 2021). Her memory also lives on in her children (David, Karl, and Allan) as all three of them hold doctorate degrees in the sciences. The Rubins’ daughter, Judy, also held a doctorate degree in the sciences and passed in 2014. 

Rubin opened the doors for many women in the sciences by remaining committed to her passions. Though various obstacles presented themselves as men tried to undermine and overshadow her contributions, others sought to support and uplift her. Once she made undeniable waves in her field, she took hold of any opportunities that allowed her to uplift those who came after her, mentoring and guiding the next generation of astronomers as best she could. Rubin shared her hopes for the future with the 1996 Berkeley graduating class:
“I hope you will love your work as I love doing astronomy. I hope that you will fight injustice and discrimination in all its guises. I hope you will value diversity among your friends, among your colleagues… among the student body population. I hope that when you are in charge, you will do better than my generation has,” (Popova 2018).