Vera Rubin Slayed in Space

[00:00:00]Hi, I'm Ashana.

[00:00:01]>> Hi, I'm Ana. And we are the co-hosts of Spaced Out Podcast. We are extremely excited to introduce to you our new miniseries, Slay in Space.

[00:00:13]>> Slaying the Fearless Legends aman and I are both women in STEM. And as two women in STEM, we are constantly inspired by the trailblazers who paved the way before us. So this series celebrates the life of women who have contributed significantly to the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and science in general. Our first episode today is about the legendary Vera Rubin who not only went on to discover the invisible in the you in the universe but to also uncover the invisible in the institutions of astronomy. So let's get into it now. What would you do if you were the first female astronomer permitted into an allmale observatory and there were no women's toilets around?

[00:01:09]I don't know. What would you do? You cut a piece of paper, stick it over the men's sign, and say that now you have a woman's toilet. And that's exactly what Vera Rubin did when she was the first female astronomer admitted into the Paloma Observatory in California.

[00:01:24]Slay sle. Now, born in 1928, think Gatsby era America, Vera was born to Eastern European Jewish parents who always looked at education as a bedrock for progress. And when she was 10 years old, she and her family moved to Washington DC in her bedroom faced north. She would always look out at the stars and map the path of meteorites and ask questions like, "Why is the moon following us home?"

[00:01:53]Yeah. And even her parents had quite a big role to play in her scientific curiosity. In fact, they were like a middle-class family, Eastern European Jewish family. And so for them, they really pri prioritized education as the bedrock for advancement. And so you know her dad and her built like a really janky telescope out of like cardboard, lenolium and lenses. That was her first telescope. Even her mom like you know Vera was extremely um had a very high level of reading and she took a note from her mom to the librarian to request to get access to the adult books which is of 12 years or older just so she could look into like the cool space and astronomy books you know. Now, coming to high school, Vera had a pretty itch with a B, a [ __ ] a [ __ ] physics teacher who essentially said that there's two types of discoveries. Discoveries that require insight and brilliance. And he would always reference male scientists when talking about this and then say discoveries that required hard work but not brilliance. And he would talk about scientists like Mary Curie.

[00:03:03]>> So annoying. But when she so she actually did apply to Vasser College and when she got her acceptance, she showed it to this annoying physics teacher of hers and he was like, "You'll do okay as long as you don't follow science."

[00:03:20]>> Itch with a B.

[00:03:21]>> That's more like Gilmore would say.

[00:03:24]>> But yeah, so after her high school, she went to Vassor College. Now, Vasser at the time was an all women's college and she went on to graduate in 1948 as the only astronomer in her graduating class.

[00:03:38]However, she wasn't the only female astronomer to graduate from Vassor.

[00:03:42]About 100 years ago, Maria Mitchell, who is the first recognized female American astronomer ever, she also graduated from Vassor and actually taught there for a while. So she laid the scientific like baseline for Vera Rubin in this college.

[00:03:59]Legends all in all. Now after her bachelors, Vera was applying to graduate school and she was interested in the astronomy program at Princeton. However, at the time they actually wouldn't allow women into their astronomy program and they didn't allow any women until 26 years later in 1975.

[00:04:17]Vera did get accepted into Harvard but she decided to go to Cornell where her husband to be or husband at the time.

[00:04:26]>> Uh he was a graduate physics student there.

[00:04:28]>> Yeah. So her time in Cornell was actually really interesting because she got to study under a lot of visionaries like Hans Beth who did a bunch of contributions to Stellar Evvolution.

[00:04:39]Check out our episode on stellar evolution to learn more about that >> and Richard Fineman, Philip Morrison, a whole bunch of like really cool Cornell folk. And um despite all of these people in their in their own fields, she was always passionate about observational astronomy, you know, so she stuck to it.

[00:04:58]She was like, I want to be an astronomer. and she wrote like uh her master's thesis and while she submitted it initially to her adviser and the chair the chairman at the time was looked at it and he was like this is interesting you should submit it to the 1950 AAS which is the American astrophysics journal um you should submit it for their December meeting however since you have a new baby on the way maybe I could give the talk and your like work would come under my came and she was just like, "Hell no."

[00:05:32]>> So, she went on to actually present this paper at the AAS in Havford 3 weeks after she'd given birth to her child. Yep. And it was a snowy snowy day in New York. And through the snowstorm they kind of her her parents picked her her husband and her one month almost one month old newborn. And they drove all the way to Havford. And they dropped her off at the meeting and I mean her father used to say that this snowstorm driving really aged me 20 years. still insists.

[00:06:03]But um she went she gave the talk and after she finished her talk there were about 10 15 angry men and they were all like really triggered at her and they were like you cannot do that and you know she doesn't really mention in her memoirs exactly why they said that but I'm pretty sure it could be because and this is my own interpretation I think but it could be firstly because uh she was a woman she wasn't an AAS member and also because the data set on her master's thesis was a little too small.

[00:06:31]However, there was one guy with a really squeaky voice, Martin Schwarz, and he said, >> "You have the data. Once we have more data, we will know more."

[00:06:41]>> And that kind of gave her that little boost to keep going. Now, after she completed her graduate studies at Cornell, she moved to Georgetown where she pursued her PhD. Her husband at the time was working at the applied physics laboratory and Georgetown offered night classes. So, Vera had two children. She was doing a PhD at night and thankfully she had a very supportive family. Her husband would go pick up her parents, bring them home to take care of the kids. He would then eat dinner in the car waiting for her to finish her night classes. And she had a sort of whole institution around her that helped her become the legend that she is. Indeed, really good intellectual support system throughout. And finally when she was done with her PhD she submitted an early draft to the astrophysics journal which is one of the journals that she used to read cover to cover all of the time. And when she submitted it, the editor-inchief at the time was Subramanyan Chandra Shakhar. Again, really cool guy. But his his our passion towards him has softened a little bit because of this very incident where he rejected her thesis her master her PhD thesis and said my doctoral student is also currently working on this and so wait till he's done and that's what we're going to publish in the astrophysical journal. So he was gatekeeping knowledge from the scientific community because he wanted his name on it.

[00:08:06]>> Yeah, >> it's with a B. No, we still like him, but a little bit annoying.

[00:08:10]>> Now, after she finished her PhD, Vera continued to work at Georgetown for some time, and it kind of goes to show just the legend that she was. So, she was doing some research with a number of her students. And when she put it forward for publication in a journal, the editor was just like, "We'll include your name but not any of the students name." She declared that she would withdraw the paper if the students name weren't names weren't included. And the editor finally agreed and all of their names were included. So she was not only, you know, pioneering in science, but really working to uplift the others around her who were working with her.

[00:08:46]>> Yeah. even even for like conferences and when she would write letters of recommendation for her students, she would make sure that the faculty that the department you know in the department where the students were applying for PhDs and stuff would have females and she would heavily like protest against going to faculties that were all male. Even for conferences, she would look at like the speaker list and if there weren't enough women, she'd like call up the conference organizers and be like, "There's not enough women on your list. Change that." And they did.

[00:09:13]>> Absolute legend. Then once she met both Margaret and Jeffrey Burbridge and again check out Stellar Revolution to learn more about them. They are also a legendary couple in the field of astronomy and she asked them if she could observe at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.

[00:09:31]Yep. And then after that she grew very close to Margaret Burbridge as well as Jeffrey Burbridge. And um Margaret is also another like trailblazer who faced a lot of sexism during her uh career as well. And finally while while they were having lunch one time Alan Sandage we'll give a little more context on him in the little in our graphic and um he offered to her saying that would you like to be the first woman to observe at the Palomar Observatory. Now it was sort of a known secret that during their graduate studies Margaret used to observe in the Palomar Observatory under her husband's name but it was all in all a boy's club. So the bathroom story that we started with at the very beginning that happened at the Paloma Observatory.

[00:10:18]So on her first day there, it was too cloudy to observe. So she was given a tour of the facility which ended in her seeing the one and only bathroom which had men plastered over it. Now in her second visit, she made it a genderneutral bathroom and was like, "Women are going to go in here as well."

[00:10:34]By her third visit, she added warmers into the observatory just to make it a lot more inclusive overall and take it away from being just a boy club. Truly a sleigh. Slay.

[00:10:46]Then we move on to the department of terrestrial magnetism, also another branch in the Carnegie Institute while she was working with Margaret and Jeffrey. And um over there she met with Kent Ford. Now Kent Ford is a cool character because he's extremely resourceful. He worked with optical devices and he had built this electric opto device that could measure and take pictures of stars at a much faster time in a much faster time as compared to the traditional uh exposure methods which is you know you use these photographic plates you leave them out for like 20 hours and then you get a picture you know of the galaxy whereas with his you it reduced the the time needed by 10 like by a factor of 10.

[00:11:31]>> Oh my goodness. Yeah, what what would take about 20 hours now took about 1.5 to two hours. So Vera and Kent worked together for a number of years. They published about nine papers together in a three-year period. Um they spent a lot of time just you know driving cold nights and getting a lot of data about different galaxies. Yep. And basically one of their main focuses was the Andromeda galaxy and what they found would shock astronomers because even though there were observations done before she just had a huge corpus of data which kind of brings us back to what Martin Swatschild had told her initially with her master's thesis about not having enough data.

[00:12:12]>> You have the data once we have more data we will know more. They collected a lot of data that pointed towards the aspect of dark matter. Okay, let's start with the definition of what a galaxy is. A galaxy is a cluster of stars that clump together with a extremely dense center.

[00:12:31]Now, we have always assumed that the way that galaxies and the stars around the galaxies move is similar to how our solar system moves. You know, so the planets that are closer to the sun have a much faster rotational revolutionary period as compared to the planets that are far away. And it it's true for our solar system. And that's how it was assumed that you know the stars that are closer to the galactic core move faster and the ones that are at the edge move slower. However, thanks to Vera and Kent Ford, they found that the rotational curves are flat, which essentially means that the stars at the edge of the galaxy are also moving at a pretty fast speed.

[00:13:13]How are they not being slingshoted out?

[00:13:15]There has to be something that should obey the laws of physics and allow there to be these stars moving at that speed.

[00:13:22]That's where dark matter comes in.

[00:13:24]>> That was beautifully explained, I must say. Um, and dark matter, I I'll explain my understanding of it. Essentially, it's called dark matter because it's matter that does not interact with light, which is why people hadn't really talked about it all this time. But the math wasn't mathing for why they had these flat rotational curves. And Vera really pioneered increased research in the field of dark matter to improve our understanding of how galaxies form, how they cluster, how they work. and um legend, bro.

[00:13:56]>> Yeah, that's she really slayed. And uh yeah, all in all, she was an incredible astronomer. And I have some fun facts about Vera that I've jotted down. Um she not only was a brilliant astronomer, but she was also a super momum. She had four children, all of whom went on to get PhDs, two geologists, one mathematician, and her daughter, just like her, became an astronomer.

[00:14:22]The first US observatory also named after a woman is the Vera C Ruben Observatory in Chile.

[00:14:28]There was a satellite named after her in 2020. An area of Mars has been named after her, the Reuben Ridge.

[00:14:36]>> Nvidia in 2024 has a CPU called Vera and a Reuben and a GPU called Reuben.

[00:14:43]In 2025, they released a US quarter with her face on it. Uh in Star Trek Discovery, you can see the Verubin Nebula again named after Vera Rubin and alas she was fe featured in Cosmos a space-time odyssey.

[00:15:01]Really really amazing and I think the she was just known to be a really kind, caring soul, really generous and such an advocate for just science for young students and women in general. And um I think something that was that really really like you know made me feel very a certain way like it literally brought tears to my eyes the first time I read this. But this is directly from her like memoir and it is a letter that she wrote to Margaret Burbridge on her 80th birthday and um it basically says that this is this is Vera addressing Margaret. You played a different role in the early Reuben household, which I had never before admitted. When I had a distasteful task, perhaps watching washing the kitchen floor when it had gotten to the state that feet would stick to it, I would stay I would say in a very loud voice, "Do you think that Margaret Burbridge is washing the floor?" Then one day I phoned in California from DC to discuss something, the Equal Rights Amendment, the AAS business. You answered the phone and said, "Can I call you back? Sarah and some friends are here and I'm in the middle of scrambling an omelette. I hung up with great joy knowing that you two shared the mundane duties of sisterhood.

[00:16:12]The mundane duties of sisterhood. That's [ __ ] beautiful, bro.

[00:16:16]>> Yeah. And then at the end the the end of the letter basically talks about from you we have learned that a woman too can rise to great heights as an astronomer and that it's all right to be charming, gracious, brilliant and to be concerned for others as we make our way in the world of science. For these and many more talents, we honor you today. Love, Vera.

[00:16:38]>> Love Vera Slade. She an absolute legend.

[00:16:42]And I hope you all enjoyed our little minieries about women who slay in space.

[00:16:47]We've started with Vera and there's so much more to come. So stay tuned.

[00:16:51]>> Space out.

[00:16:53]>> Hey, that was in sync. Let's go.

[00:16:56]>> Beautiful.

[00:16:58]Sled in space.