Vera Rubin

Biography

Vera Cooper Rubin was born in Philadelphia, USA. From childhood, she was fascinated by stars and built her first telescope. She received her education at Vassar College, Cornell and Georgetown Universities, where she earned her doctorate under the supervision of George Gamow. She worked at the Carnegie Institution in Washington. Observing galaxies with spectrographs, she discovered that stars on the periphery rotate too fast to be held by the gravity of visible matter. In 1993, she received the National Medal of Science. Many believe she deserved the Nobel Prize but did not receive it.

Key discoveries

• Galaxy rotation anomaly: she measured the orbital speeds of stars in spiral galaxies and showed that they remain constant far from the center, which contradicts the law of gravity if only visible matter is accounted for. This became the main evidence in favor of a dark matter halo.
• Proof of dark matter existence: her work with colleague Kent Ford confirmed Fritz Zwicky's hypothesis, turning dark matter from an exotic idea into a central problem of cosmology.
• Rubin-Ford effect: she discovered deviations in the redshift of galaxies that may indicate large-scale motions in the Universe.