Vera Cooper Rubin was born July 23, 1928, to Philip and Rose Appelbaum Cooper. He spent her early childhood in Philadelphia, PA and moved to Washington, D.C. when she was ten. She studied at Vassar college and then applied to attend Princeton to further her education but at the time, women were not allowed in the Princeton graduate program. Rubin then enrolled at Cornell University and earned a master's degree in 1951. She did her Ph.D. studies at Georgetown University, working on galaxy motions mentored by physicist George Gamow, and graduated in 1954. Vera Cooper Rubin married Robert Rubin, also a scientist, in 1948. They had four children, all of whom eventually became scientists as well. After finishing her graduate work Rubin continued to study the motions of galaxies. Sexism hindered some of her work, as did the "controversial" topic that she pursued: galaxy motions. She continued to fight some very obvious barriers to her work. For example, through much of her early career, she was kept from using the Palomar Observatory because of her gender. She finally got permission to observe at Palomar in 1965, the first woman allowed to do so. She began working at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, focusing on galactic and extragalactic dynamics. Years of observations led her to theorize, in 1974, the existence of an entity still unknown to man and not directly observable: dark matter. For her achievements in science, Vera won numerous awards: in 1993, the country's highest scientific honor, the National Medal of Science, and in 1981 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She worked tirelessly to bring more women into the sciences, and for recognition of their important work. In particular, she urged the National Academy of Sciences to elect more deserving women to membership. Vera Cooper Rubin stayed active in research until her death on December 25, 2016.
She discovered that the predicted motion of galaxy rotation didn't always match the observed rotation. The problem is that Galaxies rotate fast enough that they would fly apart if the combined gravitational effect of all their stars was the only thing holding them together. So, why didn't they come apart? Rubin decided that there was some kind of unseen mass in or around the galaxy helping to hold it together. The difference between the predicted and observed galaxy rotation rates was dubbed the "galaxy rotation problem". Based on the observations that Dr. Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford made, it turned out that galaxies have to have at least ten times as much "invisible" mass as they do visible mass in their stars and nebulae. Her calculations led to the development of a theory of something called "dark matter". The idea of dark matter was not strictly Vera Rubin's invention. In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky proposed the existence of something that affected galaxy motions. Just as some scientists scoffed at Dr. Rubin's early studies of galaxy dynamics, Zwicky's peers generally ignored his predictions and observations. When Dr. Rubin began her studies of galaxy rotation rates in the early 1970s, she knew she had to provide conclusive evidence for the rotation rate differences. That is why she went on to do so many observations. It was important to have conclusive data. Eventually, she found strong evidence for that "stuff" that Zwicky had suspected but never proved. Her extensive work over the following decades eventually led to the confirmation that dark matter exists.
Webography: www.thoughtco.com/vera-cooper-rubin-biography-4120939 scienzapertutti.infn.it/rubriche/biografie/2990-cooper-rubin-vera en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin
