Sandra Moore Faber (born December 28, 1944) is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the

University Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professor ...

Astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...

and

Astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the h ...

at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California syste ...

, and works at the

Lick Observatory The Lick Observatory is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by the University of California. It is on the summit of Mount Hamilton, in the Diablo Range just east of San Jose, California, United States. The observatory is managed by th ...

. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the

Faber–Jackson relation The Faber–Jackson relation provided the first empirical power-law relation between the luminosity L and the central stellar velocity dispersion \sigma of elliptical galaxy, and was presented by the astronomers Sandra M. Faber and Robert Earl ...

. Faber was also instrumental in designing the

Keck telescopes The W. M. Keck Observatory is an astronomical observatory with two telescopes at an elevation of 4,145 meters (13,600 ft) near the summit of Mauna Kea in the U.S. state of Hawaii. Both telescopes have aperture primary mirrors, and when co ...

in Hawaii.

Early life and education

Faber studied at

Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...

, majoring in

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

and minoring in

Mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and

. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1966. She then earned her PhD in 1972 from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, specializing in Optical Observational Astronomy under the direction of I. John Danziger. During this time the only observatory open to her was the

Kitt Peak National Observatory The Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is a United States astronomy, astronomical observatory located on Kitt Peak of the Quinlan Mountains in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert on the Tohono Oʼodham Nation, west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona. With ...

, which had inadequate technology for the complexity of her thesis.

Personal life

Faber married Andrew Leigh Faber, a fellow Swarthmore physics major one year her junior, on June 9, 1967. They have two daughters, Robin and Holly.

Career and research

In 1972, Faber joined the faculty of the

, becoming the first woman on staff. In 1976, Faber observed the relationship between the brightness and spectra of galaxies and the orbital speeds and motions of the stars within them. The law that resulted would become known as the

, after herself and the co-author, graduate student Robert Jackson. Three years later, Faber and collaborator John S. Gallagher published a paper collecting all of the evidence for the existence of

dark matter Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. Dark matter is called "dark" because it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not ab ...

that had been published at that point. In 1983, she published original research showing that dark matter was not composed of fast-moving

neutrino A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is a fermion (an elementary particle with spin of ) that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass ...

s ("hot dark matter") and that instead, it was likely composed of slow-moving particles yet to be discovered ("cold dark matter"). Around 1984, Faber collaborated with

Joel Primack Joel R. Primack (born July 14, 1945) is a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is a member of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. Primack received his A.B. from Princeton University in ...

, George Blumenthal, and

Martin Rees Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, ...

to elucidate their theory of how dark matter was part of

galaxy formation and evolution The study of galaxy formation and evolution is concerned with the processes that formed a heterogeneous universe from a homogeneous beginning, the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have ge ...

. This was the first proposal of how galaxies have formed and evolved from the

Big Bang The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the ...

to today. While some details have been proven wrong, the paper still stands as the current working paradigm for structure information in the universe. She and her collaborators discovered high-speed galaxy flows. In 1985, Faber was involved with the construction of the

Keck Telescope The W. M. Keck Observatory is an astronomical observatory with two telescopes at an elevation of 4,145 meters (13,600 ft) near the summit of Mauna Kea in the U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entit ...

and building the first wide-field planetary camera for the

Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versa ...

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

physicist

Jerry Nelson Jerry L. Nelson (July 10, 1934 – August 23, 2012) was an American puppeteer, best known for his work with The Muppets. Renowned for his wide range of characters and singing abilities, he performed Muppet characters on ''Sesame Street'', ' ...

designed the Keck telescope, but Faber helped to sell the idea of large optical telescopes all over the world. The Keck telescope is the second largest optical telescope in the world, with a 10-meter primary mirror of a novel type that consists of 36 hexagonal segments. Sandra Faber co-chaired the Science Steering Committee, which oversaw the first-light instrument for Keck I. She also continued to insist on high optical quality for the primary mirror of the Keck I, and went on to work on the Keck II as well. During the later 1980s, Faber got involved in an eight-year project called the "

Seven Samurai is a 1954 Japanese epic samurai drama film co-written, edited, and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The story takes place in 1586 during the Sengoku period of Japanese history. It follows the story of a village of desperate farmers who hire seven ...

" collaboration, which attempted to catalogue the size and orbital speeds of 400 galaxies. Though this goal was not met, the group developed a way to estimate the distance to any galaxy, which became one of the most reliable ways to measure the total density of the universe. In 1990, she assisted with the on-orbit commissioning of the wide field planetary camera for the Hubble Space Telescope. She says this was one of the most exhilarating and well-known phases of her career. The optics of the Hubble were flawed, and Faber and her team helped to diagnose the cause as

spherical aberration In optics, spherical aberration (SA) is a type of optical aberration, aberration found in optical systems that have elements with spherical surfaces. Lens (optics), Lenses and curved mirrors are prime examples, because this shape is easier to man ...

.Faber, S. (1995, July 12). Autobiographical Sketch: Sandra M Faber. Retrieved November 14, 2015, from http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/articles/faber.htm In 1995, Faber was appointed University Professor at UCSC. Faber was also the principal investigator of the Nuker Team, which used the Hubble Space Telescope to search for

supermassive black holes A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical ob ...

at the centers of galaxies. One of her most recent works include the addition of a new optical spectrograph for the Keck II telescope, which saw its first light in 1996. The new addition would increase the Keck II's power for observing far-away galaxies by 13-fold. She has also joined up with other scientists to create the CANDELS project, which is the largest survey of the universe taken by the Hubble Telescope. At UCSC she focuses her research on the evolution of structure in the universe and the evolution and formation of galaxies. In addition to this, she led the development of the DEIMOS instrument on the

to obtain spectra of cosmologically distant galaxies. On August 1, 2012 she became the Interim Director of the

University of California Observatories The University of California Observatories (UCO) is a multi-campus astronomical research unit of the University of California, with headquarters on the UC Santa Cruz campus. UCO operates the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, and the technical l ...

. Sandra Faber was a co-editor of the '' Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics'' with

Ewine van Dishoeck Ewine Fleur van Dishoeck (born 13 June 1955, in Leiden) is a Dutch astronomer and chemist. She is Professor of Molecular Astrophysics at Leiden Observatory, and served as the President of the International Astronomical Union (2018–2021) and a ...

from 2012–2021.

Honors and awards

* 1977, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship * 1978, Bart J. Bok Prize,

* 1985. elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

* 1985,

Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics The Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics is jointly awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics for outstanding work in astrophysics. It is funded by the Heineman Foundation in honour of Dannie Heinem ...

* 1986, Honorary Degree,

* 1989, elected member,

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

* 1996-1997, Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Lectureship and Medal,

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

* 1997, Honorary Degree,

Williams College Williams College is a Private college, private liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a col ...

* 2001, elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

* 2005, Medaille de l'Institute d'Astrophysique de Paris * 2006,

Harvard Centennial Medal The Harvard Centennial Medal is an honor given by the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to recipients of graduate degrees from the School for their "contributions to society." The Medal was established in 1989 on the 100th anniversary o ...

* 2006, Member,

Harvard Board of Overseers The Harvard Board of Overseers (more formally The Honorable and Reverend the Board of Overseers) is one of Harvard University's two governing boards. Although its function is more consultative and less hands-on than the President and Fellows of Harv ...

* 2006, Honorary Degree,

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

* 2009,

Bower Award The Franklin Institute Awards (or Benjamin Franklin Medal) is an American science and engineering award presented by the Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia. The Franklin Institute awards comprises the Benjamin Franklin Medals ...

and Prize for Achievement in Science,

Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and the center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memori ...

* 2010, Honorary Degree,

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

* 2011, Honorary Degree,

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

* 2011,

Henry Norris Russell Lectureship The Henry Norris Russell Lectureship is awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of a lifetime of excellence in astronomical research. The idea for the lectureship came from then society President Harlow Shapley in 1945, ...

American Astronomical Society The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes spoken as "double-A-S") is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The primary objective of the AAS is to promote the adv ...

* 2012,

Bruce Medal The Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal is awarded every year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for outstanding lifetime contributions to astronomy. It is named after Catherine Wolfe Bruce, an American patroness of astronomy, and was firs ...

, Astronomical Society of the Pacific * 2012,

Karl Schwarzschild Medal The Karl Schwarzschild Medal, named after the astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild, is an award presented by the Astronomische Gesellschaft (German Astronomical Society) to eminent astronomers and astrophysicists. Recipients SourceGerman Astronomical ...

, German Astronomical Society *2012,

National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social scienc ...

* 2017,

Gruber Prize in Cosmology The Gruber Prize in Cosmology, established in 2000, is one of three prestigious international awards worth US$500,000 made by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Since 2001, the G ...

* 2018, Magellanic Premium Medal,

* 2020,

Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society The Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society is the highest award given by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). The RAS Council have "complete freedom as to the grounds on which it is awarded" and it can be awarded for any reason. Past awar ...

* 2020, Elected a Legacy Fellow of the

* Member, Board of Trustees of the

Carnegie Institution for Science The Carnegie Institution of Washington (the organization's legal name), known also for public purposes as the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS), is an organization in the United States established to fund and perform scientific research. Th ...

* Minor planet #283277 Faber is named for her.

References

External links

Inventory of the Sandra M. Faber Papers
Online Archive of California
Dr. Faber's page @ UCSC

* , from the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures
Oral history interview transcript with Sandra M. Faber on 15 October 1955, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives

Oral history interview transcript with Sandra M. Faber on 12 November 2020, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives

Video of Faber talking about her work
from the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation {{DEFAULTSORT:Faber, Sandra M. 1944 births Living people American women astronomers American cosmologists Scientists from California Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Lick Observatory University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Winners of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics 20th-century American astronomers 21st-century American astronomers 20th-century American women scientists 21st-century American women scientists Swarthmore College alumni Members of the American Philosophical Society Sloan Research Fellows Recipients of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society Planetary scientists Women planetary scientists Fellows of the American Astronomical Society Annual Reviews (publisher) editors