VERA RUBIN
Rubin unlocked the secrets of galaxy rotation
Rubin was always fascinated by the stars. After earning her undergraduate degree at Vassar College, Rubin attempted to enrol at Princeton University, where she hoped to continue her dreams of becoming an astronomer. However, the institution refused her based on the fact that she was a woman, despite her obvious talent.
This extremely unfair ruling wouldn’t be lifted until 1975. Rubin wasn’t put off and refused to let Princeton dictate her career path, instead applying to Cornell University. Encouraged by her supervisors, Rubin completed her studies in 1951. During this time, and unknown to her, she would make one of the first observations of the motions of galaxies. At this point, it was suggested that galaxies moved outwards in accordance with the Big Bang theory, but Rubin figured that these structures swirled around some unknown centre. Unfortunately for Rubin, her suggestion wasn’t well received by the scientific community.
Rubin went on to graduate from Georgetown University with a PhD in 1954. Under advisor George Gamow, Rubin concluded that galaxies clumped together in clusters. The idea of galaxy clusters was ludicrous according to the majority of scientists, and it wasn’t until two decades later that they would be persuaded otherwise. In 1965, Rubin became the first woman to be granted permission to use the instruments at Palomar Observatory, a privately owned astronomical facility in California. This marked a turning point. As women had previously not been authorised to access the observatory’s facilities, other female astronomers began to come forward to use Palomar for their own scientific research. In the same year, Rubin successfully secured a position in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where she began work on galaxy clusters. She didn’t carry out her research alone, however, and enlisted the help of instrument maker Kent Ford to make hundreds of galactic observations. What she found was even more extraordinary than her previous work and would have consequences for our understanding of today’s cosmos.
When it comes to galaxy rotation, astronomers have theoretical models of how fast they spin at given distances from their centres – an idea plotted out as a rotation curve. Yet when Rubin observed galaxies, she found that their rotation curves didn’t match up to theory. What could the explanation be? Little did she and Ford know, they had found the first indicator of dark matter, an elusive material regarded as 26.8 per cent of the ‘missing’ mass of the universe. Rubin knew that her new findings would be criticised; in a bid to avoid this, she decided to slant her research more towards the study of the rotation curves of singular galaxies, rather than the wildly debated galaxy clusters. She began her research with our closest spiral, the Andromeda Galaxy.