Women's History Month: Celebrating Contributions to STEM

At the time, she lived with her two parents, both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and her older sister. She maintained her love for the stars through high school, but faced her first obstacle when her high school advisor recommended she become a painter and give up on astronomy.

She ignored her counselor’s advice and, in 1948, she graduated from Vassar College as the college’s only astronomy major. She married her husband, physicist Robert Rubin, the same year. But her journey to become an astronomer seemed to hit a snag when she was rejected from Princeton University. At the time, women were not allowed in their master’s program in astronomy, and this wouldn’t change until 1975. Rubin, however, had already proved she was not the kind of woman to be deterred from her passion. 

She put Princeton’s rejection aside as readily as she ignored her high school counselor’s advice and went on to earn her MA in Astronomy from Cornell University (where she studied under the great physicist Richard Feynman), followed by a Ph.D. in 1954 from Georgetown University. Her research focused on galaxy dynamics, which she explored more in-depth after taking a research position at the Carnegie Institute in Washington D.C. During this time, she teamed up with instrument maker, Kent Ford, to pursue her controversial research.

Kent Ford was the inventor of a sensitive spectrometer, a device that detects light and divides it into the colors of which it is composed. This allows scientists to study both light and the materials interacting with it. Rubin and Ford used the spectrometer to measure the light from stars in spiral galaxies outside the milky way. They measured doppler shifts – the same effect that meteorologists use to track storm systems – and were thus able to determine the orbital speeds of stars. 

Rubin expected the speeds to be greater at the center of the galaxies, because it was believed that galaxies worked like solar systems, with objects closer to the gravitational center rotating faster than those at the outer edges. But the results took Rubin by surprise. The stars on the outer edges moved just as fast as those at the center. The inescapable conclusion was that there had to be more mass creating the extra gravity needed for the stars to move at such rapid speeds. Rubin calculated that the galaxies she studied contained 90% invisible matter. She realized there was now hard evidence for the dark matter Fritz Zwicky postulated decades ago. 

Her research was met with some resistance, but given the thorough nature of her calculations, her conclusions were soon accepted. The discovery later earned her a membership to the National Academy of Sciences. Controversially, however, she never received the Nobel Prize for her work, which remained a contentious issue for feminists leading up to Rubin’s death. She did, however, receive many awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Science and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

Vera Rubin passed away on December 25, 2016, leaving behind four children, all of whom became scientists in their own right. During her lifetime, she was an ardent advocate for women in science, writing many letters of recommendation for young women who wanted to enter graduate programs in science. In those letters, she admonished the universities for not having women scientists among their faculty. She also kept a keen eye on the lists of speakers invited to scientific conferences and promptly contacted the organizers to encourage more women speakers.

On the topic of women in science, Rubin famously stated: “There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. Don’t let anyone keep you down for silly reasons such as who you are.”

Vera Rubin is one of many women to make major contributions to STEM throughout history. This month, the Library’s youth programming team is celebrating Women’s History Month by highlighting engineer Emily Warren Roebling, whose revolutionary work on suspension bridges was integral in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. All month, kids are invited to Activate STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) and build a suspension bridge of their own.