Vera Rubin

Her father anglicized his name from Pesach Kobchefski to Pete Cooper and worked as an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone, where he had met her mother. The family moved to Washington in 1938, and at 10 she watched the stars from her bedroom window and built a telescope out of cardboard with her father so she could track meteors. A high school science teacher advised her to give up science and become an artist. She went to Vassar instead, where Maria Mitchell had taught, and was the only astronomy graduate in the class of 1948. Princeton would not let her apply, its astronomy department having barred women until 1975. Harvard took her and she turned it down, because she was getting married and her husband was at Cornell.

She read her first paper to the American Astronomical Society in December 1950, three weeks after giving birth, before she was a member and against her advisers' wishes. The reception was uniformly hostile and the paper went unpublished. Her 1954 doctorate argued that galaxies clump rather than scatter evenly through space, and nobody took it up for 20 years. She learned to pick quiet questions. Rotation curves were supposed to be one. At the Carnegie Institution, using Kent Ford's image-tube spectrograph, she measured how fast the outer parts of spiral galaxies turn, starting with Andromeda, and found that they turn as fast as the middle. That should pull a galaxy apart. Her numbers said each one holds five to ten times more mass than its light accounts for.

In 1965 she became the first woman allowed to observe at Palomar, and was told her time there would be short because the observatory had no women's bathroom. She cut a paper skirt, taped it over the stick figure on the men's room door, said now you have a ladies' room, and went to work. Georgetown had already refused to let her meet her doctoral adviser in his office, because women were not permitted in that part of a Catholic university. A newspaper had run her first conference paper under the headline Young Mother Has Own Theory of Universe. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981, only the second woman astronomer ever admitted, and called the number of women elected in the years afterward the saddest part of her life.

She died on the night of December 25, 2016, at 88, in an assisted living facility in Princeton, with dementia. The Nobel never came, and the argument about why has not ended: some hold that the committee simply overlooked her, some that it could not settle whether the prize belonged to the measurement or to the dark matter the measurement implied, and some point at Fritz Zwicky, who proposed unseen mass in the 1930s. Princeton, which would not let her apply in 1948, gave her an honorary doctorate in 2005. In December 2019 Congress renamed the telescope rising on Cerro Pachón for her. It began returning images in 2025. Her face went onto a quarter the same year.

Vera Rubin's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fluctuations in the Space Distribution of the Galaxies article
  Her thesis, arguing that galaxies clump. Nobody followed it for 20 years. 1954
• Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula from a Spectroscopic Survey of Emission Regions article
  With Kent Ford. The flat rotation curve that started the argument. 1970
• The Rubin-Ford effect discovery
  An apparent anisotropy in cosmic expansion, dismissed then confirmed as large-scale streaming 1976
• Rotational Properties of 21 Sc Galaxies article
  The survey that made the rotation problem impossible to wave away 1980
• Cospatial Counterrotating Stellar Disks in NGC 4550 article
  Gas and stars going opposite ways, and the first evidence for galaxy mergers 1992
• Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters book
  Her own account, in the Masters of Modern Physics series 1997

• 1938 aged ~10 The family moves to Washington, where she starts watching the sky from her window She and her father built a telescope out of cardboard to track meteors.
• 1948 aged ~20 Graduates from Vassar, the only astronomy major in her class Princeton would not accept applications from women. She turned down Harvard to marry.
• December 1950 aged 22 Reads a paper to the American Astronomical Society three weeks after giving birth A wire story ran under the headline Young Mother Has Own Theory of Universe.
• 1954 aged ~26 Finishes a Georgetown doctorate under George Gamow
• 1965 aged ~37 Joins the Carnegie Institution and becomes the first woman to observe at Palomar The observatory had no women's bathroom. She made one with paper and tape.
• 1970 aged ~42 Publishes the Andromeda rotation curve with Kent Ford The outer regions were moving as fast as the inner ones.
• 1981 aged ~53 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the second woman astronomer ever
• 1996 aged ~68 Takes the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society The first woman to receive it since Caroline Herschel in 1828.
• December 25, 2016 aged 88 Dies in Princeton at 88

• Maria Mitchell 1818–1889
  First American woman professional astronomer who discovered a comet and taught at Vassar College. the astronomer whose college she chose
• Edwin Hubble 1889–1953
  Astronomer whose discovery of expanding galaxies provided the foundation for the Big Bang theory. measured the deviations from his flow
• Annie Jump Cannon 1863–1941
  Developed the stellar spectral classification system still used to categorize stars. earlier woman at the plates
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt 1868–1921
  Discovered the Cepheid period-luminosity relation that made measuring cosmic distances possible. earlier woman at the plates
• Neil deGrasse Tyson b. 1958
  Astrophysicist and science communicator who has made cosmology accessible to millions through television. later public voice for the field