Vera Rubin was born Vera Cooper in Philadelphia, USA in 1928. Looking at the night sky through her bedroom window kindled her curiosity in astronomy and, with her father, she built a telescope from a cardboard tube to better observe the sky. When she later earned a scholarship to Vassar College, her high school science teacher advised her to ‘stay away from science’. Luckily Vera ignored this advice, and in 1948 she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in astronomy.
In the same year she began a master’s degree at Cornell University and married mathematical physicist Robert Rubin. Whilst examining the movement of galaxies she found a region of space with a higher density of galaxies than other regions. Vera had identified the supergalactic plane — the equator of the supercluster of galaxies that contains the Milky Way. However, the talk on her research was poorly received, and her data were not published. The supergalactic plane was not definitively identified until many years later.
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