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Vera Rubin's theories became cornerstones of modern astronomy
Monday, March 20, 2000
Nearly 70 years ago, astronomer Fritz Zwicky found that groups of galaxies called clusters moved as if they contained far more stars than could be seen through telescopes. This discrepancy was dubbed the "missing mass" problem. No one considered this observation to be of great significance until the late 1970s, when Vera Rubin made a remarkable discovery.
Rubin, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institute of Washington, was born in Philadelphia in 1928. She earned degrees in astronomy from Vassar in 1948 and Cornell in 1950. She intended to study at Princeton but was rejected because that university did not accept women into graduate programs in astronomy.
Daring to apply to a "men only" science program was Rubin's first negative splash in astronomy. Her master's thesis was the second. She proposed that galaxies moved in controversial ways. In 1954 she received her doctorate from Georgetown University. In her thesis, Rubin proposed that galaxies were distributed in clumps. Fifteen years later, astronomers finally confirmed her conclusions.
In 1978, Rubin turned Zwicky's "missing mass" question into one of the hottest topics in astronomy. She published detailed observations showing that the amount of matter in galaxies that could be seen was far too little to hold them together as they rotated. That unseen material today is called "dark matter." Astronomers now believe that up to 90 percent of the matter in the universe is unaccounted for.
-- By John G. Radzilowicz, director, Henry Buhl Jr. Planetarium & Observatory
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