- In 1965, Rubin became the first woman permitted to observe at the Palomar Observatory. In 1993, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton. Also, in 1996 she became the first woman to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (London) since Caroline Herschel in 1828.
- [2020] A large telescope under construction in the mountains of Chile will be named the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It will observe the entire sky at once, tracking the motions of galaxies and continuing the research into dark matter.
- Vera Cooper Rubin, Senior Fellow of Astronomy in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at Carnegie Institution of Washington, is the author of "Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters" (American Institute of Physics, 1997).
- Earned her Ph. D. from Georgetown University in 1954 with the dissertation "Fluctuations in the Space Distribution of the Galaxies."
- With husband mathematician/physicist Dr. Robert Rubin, she has three sons (David, Allen, and Carl) and a daughter (Judy). David and Allen are geophysicists, Carl is a mathematician, and Judy is an astronomer.
- In 1948 she applied to Princeton University for graduate studies, but women were not accepted in the astronomy program. Instead, she attended Cornell, and then Georgetown University, where she taught for ten years.
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