DarkMatter/VeraRubin

Early Interactions with Vera Rubin

Note from Joel E. Tohline: I doubt that she knew it, but Dr. Vera C. Rubin was a significant influence on my astronomy career. What follows are some highlights of my early professional interactions with her.

Neighborhood Meeting at Yale University (1970)

Yale Neighborhood Meeting (1979)

For two years, beginning in the summer of 1978, I held a J. Willard Gibbs instructorship in the astronomy department of Yale University. In my first year, I was encouraged — along with another young astronomer, Dr. Carol A. Christian — to organize a so-called Neighborhood Meeting at Yale. The idea was to focus on a topic that would bring together faculty, postdocs and graduate students from universities and research centers that were "within driving distance" of the Yale campus; this, and limiting the gathering to 1.5 days (just one overnight stay) would keep travel expenses to a minimum. We accepted the challenge. Given that, at that time, the astrophysics community, worldwide, was making significant progress on a number of issues related to galaxies — both observationally and theoretically — the topic we picked was …

Rotation: The Dynamical Structure of Galaxies (A Neighborhood Meeting at Yale University) Dates: 23 - 24 March 1979

Vera Rubin agreed to be our opening speaker. It was an opportunity for the $(>90)$ attendees to hear and see — first hand from the expert — how significant the evidence was for flat rotation curves. Five speakers followed: Dr. Jeremiah Ostriker (Princeton), Dr. Alar Toomre (MIT), Dr. Kevin Prendergast (Columbia University), Dr. Paul Schechter (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), and Dr. Richard Miller (Chicago).

Tohline Visits CIW:TDM (1980)

In early February, 1980, I visited the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (CIW:DTM) in Washington, DC to meet and interact with Vera Rubin and her research group. During that visit, I had the opportunity to present an informal talk in which I pitched the idea that flat rotation curves in galaxies might be explained by modifying Newton's law of gravity at large distances. This is the idea that I first presented in a formal manner in the summer of 1982 at the IAU Symposium No. 100.

IAU Symposium No. 100 (1982)

An astronomical symposium sanctioned by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) titled, Internal Kinematics and Dynamics of Galaxies, was held in Besançon, France, August 9 - 13, 1982. This is the professional conference at which I presented a short "poster paper" titled, "

See Also

• Finzi (1963) — On the Validity of Newton's Law at a Long Distance
• Notes from Beatrice Tinsley dated July 3, 1978.
• Stabilizing a Cold Disk with a $1/r$ Force Law.
• Does Gravity Exhibit a $1/r$ force on the Scale of Galaxies?
• Kuhn & Kruglyak (1987) — Non-Newtonian forces and the invisible mass problem
• Sanders (2014) — A Historical Perspective on Modified Newtonian Dynamics