Vera looks at the marble bust of a serious woman
with her hair worn in ringlets.
Scientists should know who came before them.
It’s a hundred years since Maria Mitchell’s comet discovery.
and there’s no notice even here,
where she taught for twenty years.
Maud Makemson picks up an old celestial globe
from a table covered with star charts and stones.
This was going to be thrown away,
but I thought you might want it.
The globe, its surface wrinkled with age,
feels heavy in Vera’s hands. She’s uncertain
what this history has to do with her, but grateful
for her professor’s vision of her as an astronomer.
She thinks she loves Bob but needs to tell him
she’s not ready to stop asking questions about galaxies.
On her way out of the observatory, Vera winds her scarf
around the marble bust of Maria Mitchell.
Maybe Professor Makemson is right.
Women pioneers in science and math deserve more respect.
Back Roads
One weekend walking past woods, Vera tells Bob,
Princeton won’t take women, but I applied to Harvard
for graduate school. They have good telescopes.
He nods. You should go to the best university.
If Bob hadn’t wanted her to go to wherever
she chose, she might not have said that she could learn
anywhere, might not have applied to Cornell.
His proposal isn’t like a math problem
for which she has to consider a series of what-ifs.
Vera doesn’t hesitate before saying yes.
The Wedding
After the crack of purposely shattered glass,
cries of Mazel tov, and wishes for many children,
Vera and Bob Rubin hold hands as darkness comes,
vow to keep room for both science and religion.
Stars within galaxies change, and galaxies
within clusters change, and clusters of galaxies
change within the universe. The sky is one wide road.
The Motion of Galaxies
ITHACA, NEW YORK, 1949
The head of the astronomy department greets Vera, saying,
There aren’t many jobs in astronomy. Don’t expect to get one.
She’d hoped for a warmer welcome, but other professors
support her studies of movements in 109 spiral galaxies.
She charts star speeds and directions,
measures how each shrinks or grows,
writes equations that sprawl and tangle
into brief certainty, then back to wonder:
Does the universe rotate
the way planets move around the sun?
While she works toward a master’s degree in astronomy,
Bob continues studying for a PhD in physics.
In the evenings, at the kitchen table,
on the sofa, or in bed, they talk
about raccoons prowling the neighborhood,
the age of the milk in the refrigerator, and the cosmos.
As Vera cleans her glasses, spreads papers
under a green-shaded lamp, Bob teases her about the way
she tilts her head when a problem confounds her.
After just over a year of marriage, Vera’s skin feels tender.
She’s tired. She counts back weeks,
then the months ahead, eager to complete her paper
about the rotation of galaxies before giving birth.
Hers
The head of the astronomy department reads Vera’s thesis,
says, Some of your research looks sloppy, but
it might be discussed at the American Astronomical Society.
Professor Shaw glances at Vera’s arcing belly.
I’ll read it and use my name, since I’m a member.
If you think people will be interested, I’ll go,
Vera says. And read my paper under my own name.
What One Young Mother Finds
Vera and Bob don’t own a car, but her parents offer
to drive them from Ithaca with their three-week-old boy,
who’s gorgeous and complicated as a galaxy.
Vera loves the way the baby seems knowable
in the moment but holds secrets inside.
Thick snow blows over the sedan her father
sometimes pulls over to scrape ice off the windshield.
The heater clatters and clangs. As the car skids,
Vera tightens her grip on the baby on her lap.
Your father escaped from anti-Semitic thugs in Poland,
Mom says. He can get his family through a New York blizzard.
They arrive safely at the conference center.
Her mother minds the baby while Vera speaks
from the podium. After some applause, she hurries out
to see how her boy is faring.
The next day her speech is reported
on the front page of the Washington Post:
YOUNG MOTHER FINDS CENTER OF CREATION.
The Promise
WASHINGTON, DC
Vera and Bob move to the city where she grew up.
Bob takes a job doing math and physics research.
By the time their firstborn wobbles while learning
to walk, they expect another baby.
Vera brings David to play with her old friend Jane’s
two small children. After they help them stack blocks,
arranging a home for a toy bear
and a hangar for tiny airplanes,
Vera quietly asks Jane, Do you ever get bored?
Who could ask for more than healthy children?
Seeing Vera’s forehead wrinkle, she adds,
I didn’t like college as much as you did.
Math was a lot harder than what we did in high school.
I got lost in some of my first classes, Vera says.
But you weren’t there to say, “Keep going.” No one was.
More than one teacher said,
“Didn’t you learn this in high school?”
making it sound like I’d never catch up.
Ow! A child trips over a toy truck, wails.
Back home, Vera settles David for a nap,
makes tea, shoves aside clean but unfolded diapers,
a windup duck, a toy tractor. She picks up
the Astrophysical Journal and flips through pages
to an article about the structure of galaxies.
Her face is tear-blotched when Bob comes home.
He asks, Didn’t you have a good time with Jane?
Yes. No. Bob, I’m not an astronomer. I need a PhD.
He lifts her dark hair, kisses her neck, says, I took the job
in Washington knowing there are universities nearby.
The Window
After the Rubins’ second child is born,
Vera’s mother cares for David and baby Judy
while Vera takes classes at Georgetown University.
She earns a PhD, then teaches physics and math part-time.
One night she walks past the kitchen
where Bob washes dishes
and the room they’ve made ready for the third baby.
She sits on her daughter’s bed and reads her a book
about a lost puppy. After saying, The end,
she asks, Want me to open the window?
Yes, Mommy. Can I touch the stars?
Nobody can, but you can reach. Vera kisses Judy
and her stuffed rabbit. Then, at the kitchen table,
she moves aside books and cereal boxes with mazes
on the back, tends to calculations until two in the morning.
The work is hard, but it would be harder to set it aside.
Invisible Light
Ten years after Ve
ra gave birth to her first child,
she has her fourth and last baby. The children sleep,
wake, and wonder in a big old house with floors covered
with broken crayons, balsa-wood airplanes,
magnets, experiments, and Tinkertoy skyscrapers.
After David, Judy, Karl, and Allan are all in school,
Vera is hired to do research
at the Carnegie Institution of Science,
which has new equipment that widens horizons.
Kent Ford built a spectroscope that splits visible light
into a spectrum of colors.
It can show evidence of light people can’t see,
such as radio or gamma waves, or waves that can warm food,
let doctors see through muscle to bones, or tan skin.
Vera and Kent first study newly discovered quasars,
which are dazzling, wildly energetic, and enormous.
They might contain black holes, also powerful and huge.
Quasars, which are brighter and farther away
than most galaxies,
are a popular subject among astronomers, who usually spend
more time with math and data than observing.
Since Vera’s children need her at home,
she’ll spend even less time at telescopes than most.
She looks for a focus that scientists will care about,
but not so much they’re likely to compete,
or ask a lot of questions before she’s certain of answers,
and make her feel like she should rush.
Vera decides to focus on her old interest:
the way stars move in spiral galaxies,
which bulge in the middle with arcing arms.
Her mother takes care of the children when she and Kent
travel to use big telescopes on mountains in Arizona.
Far-off galaxies are easier to see
where there’s less atmosphere and light pollution.
Vera’s feet and hands are often cold in observatories,
which aren’t heated, since telescopes are kept
at the outdoor temperature so they don’t distort.
She points the telescope toward stars in Andromeda, M31,
the galaxy nearest to the Milky Way, the galaxy we live in.
Kent attaches the spectrograph, which bends light
the way a prism or a drop of water splinters
into a purple, blue, yellow, and red spectrum.
They take photographs of trails
that sketch shine long after a star’s life is over.
Small measurements may lead to big discoveries.
Patterns
Back home, Vera slides photographic plates
under a microscope. She works on calculations
from the thousands of thin lines on the photographs
that stand for a galaxy.
Curving and flat lines show what stars are made of, their size,
temperature, and how far and fast they move.
Starlight moving closer to earth has shorter wavelengths,
shifts to the blue end of the spectrum.
Light that moves away shifts to the red end.
Like a telescope, math pulls in what’s grand,
pares in search of what’s crucial. She’s meticulous.
Minuscule errors matter the way a slight change
in the angle of a wrist can widely shift the arc of a ball struck
by a bat or hockey stick, or tossed into a hoop.
She measures spaces between the strips of colors
to calculate the speed of stars
and the distances between them,
looks for patterns between a star’s speed
and its distance from the galaxy’s center.
Each answer stirs new questions.
Summer
The family camps out west, where the children
scramble up boulders, shout, play king of the mountain.
At night, stars show off above the soft flicker of campfires.
Vera wants her children to know science is beautiful
both on paper and seen in the sky.
Much can be found in the places where few look.
Inheritance
Come inside, Allan, Vera calls to her youngest child,
who crouches by the steps, breaking open
chunks of granite and quartz. She says, It’s getting dark.
I don’t want you to hammer off a finger.
She walks through the living room, where David
practices the violin. Karl builds a model of a triceratops.
A math book is wedged between sofa cushions. She pulls
it out and flips through. Pictures of pale, freckled boys
with clipped hair are shown measuring boards
and counting nails for a tree house
or mapping ways to outer space.
Girls wearing crisp dresses work on cookie recipes.
Vera heads to Judy’s bedroom after hearing her scream.
She finds her daughter hunched over her desk.
Judy pushed aside poems she’s written
to make room for an open book under the green lamp.
I hate math. I can’t do this!
Vera looks over her equation. You meant to get it right.
I don’t even care. Math isn’t good for anything.
You use math when you write poems or sew.
The sewing machine is broken. Mom, go away.
Vera leaves the door open. She pushes aside
books on the dining room table, copies
of the Astrophysical Journal she should sort, saving
those she hasn’t read yet or that have articles she wrote.
She hears Bob and Judy by the broken sewing machine
they’re taking apart on the kitchen table. She taught
Judy how to lay down a tissue pattern, measure,
with her mouth full of pins. Bob shows her
how gears mesh together, what moves the needle
up and down, what catches and nudges along the cloth.
Paper Skirt
CALTECH, CALIFORNIA, 1965
Vera applies to use the world’s biggest telescope.
Palomar Observatory stands on a southern California
mountain whose peak reaches over fog, but not so high
that stars are likely to be hidden in clouds.
Desert, woods, and fern meadows surround the white dome.
Vera receives a typed letter saying: Due to limited facilities,
it’s not possible for the observatory to accept applications
from women. Penciled in before not possible is usually.
Vera takes that penciled-in word to mean Yes.
She flies across the country, finds the observatory bathroom
has a picture of a man’s silhouette on the door.
She cuts out a paper skirt, tapes it on top.
Now there’s a ladies’ room. That wasn’t so hard.
Belief
Vera spends more time searching than with certainty.
Stuck on a problem, she plays a few songs on the piano,
takes a walk, comes back and finds an equation
no longer stubborn, but ready to reveal secrets.
Still trying to understand how galaxies orbit,
Vera sketches. Moving her wrist and gaze together,
she turns what she sees into lines.
She knows that planets closest to the sun move faster
than planets farther from the sun and its gravitational force.
She’s been taught that stars within galaxies also move fastest
near the center, dense and brilliant with stars,
and more slowly on the outskirts.
But flat spectral lines suggest the outermost stars
move at the same speed as stars close to the core.
The rotation curve is flat, she tells Kent,
This means
the stars on the outer curve
don’t slow down because of their distance from the core,
the way most astronomers have long assumed.
Doubt paves a path to discovery.
Could something be wrong with her eyes or mind?
Was she daydreaming, distracted, or tired?
She goes back over stacked pages of math,
looking for a mistake deep in
that might have set everything else astray.
Not one digit is off. She checks the spectroscope
and cameras for flaws in the mechanics
and lenses but finds nothing wrong. She breathes
deeply into the courage to believe what she sees.
Whether on the outskirts of the Andromeda galaxy
or near the center, stars move at the same speed.
The Backyard
JULY 20, 1969
The Rubins’ living room smells of butter and popcorn.
The black-and-white television flickers with smoky images
of three astronauts arriving near the moon.
An electric fan hums in the heat. Models of rockets
built by their youngest son are propped among geology books
their oldest brought back from college and college catalogs
ordered by Judy, who will apply for admission in the fall.
As the television shows the lunar module land on the moon,
the whole family cheers and hugs. Then Karl dozes off.
Bob tells eight-year-old Allan, It’s going to be a while
before the astronauts step out onto the moon.
You might want to catch some sleep.
Allan shakes his head.
His oldest brother stacks, then tips over
books to show how continents shifted. David says,
It happened long ago, before people were around.
Then how do you know it happened? Allan asks.
There’s a long valley along undersea mountains
where the break might have been. Now almost all
scientists believe in continental shift, but hardly any
did when Mom and Dad were your age.
Vera talks about the thousands of workers
who helped get three people into space.
Allan slides off the sofa, says, I want to go outside.
I know we can’t see the astronauts up there,
but I want to look.
Grasping Mysteries Page 12
