Vera Cooper was born on July 23, 1928, in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the younger of two sisters born to a
Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. Her father, Pesach Kobchefski, immigrated with his mother and three siblings to
Gloversville, New York, reuniting with his father who had immigrated a year or two earlier. Pesach soon
anglicized his name to Pete Cooper, and as an adult studied
electrical engineering and worked at
Bell Telephone. He married Rose Applebaum, a second generation American born to a mother who had immigrated from
Bessarabia (in present-day
Moldova and
Ukraine) to Philadelphia. They met at Bell, where Rose worked until they married. In 1938 the family moved to Washington, D.C., "Even then I was more interested in the question than in the answer," she remembered. "I decided at an early age that we inhabit a very curious world." She built a crude
telescope out of cardboard with her father, and began to observe and track
meteors. She earned her bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1948. Cornell was not known during this period for the excellence of its astronomy department, composed as it was of only four members. It did, however, boast an excellent physics faculty, and much of the coursework for Rubin's degree was taught within this department. Noted physicist
Philip Morrison and future
Nobelists Hans Bethe and
Richard Feynman worked with Rubin during this period. At Cornell, she worked with astronomer Martha Carpenter on galactic dynamics and studied the motions of galaxies. From this work, Rubin made one of the first observations of deviations from
Hubble flow. Though her conclusions – that there was an orbital motion of galaxies around a particular pole – were later disproven, the idea that galaxies were moving held true and sparked further research. These circumstances did not go unnoticed. Her presentation to the AAS in December 1950 received front page headlines ("Young Mother Has Own Theory of Universe", read the lede, disseminated from an article in the Washington Post). The talk received – to Rubin's personal recollection – universally negative feedback and the paper was not published. although much of her classwork was completed with Georgetownian
Francis Heyden. Her dissertation, completed in 1954, concluded that galaxies clumped together, rather than being randomly distributed through the universe, a controversial idea not pursued by others for two decades. == Career ==