On the finish of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the doable for girls in science with her well-known comet discovery, astronomer Maria Mitchell confided in one in every of her Vassar college students that she would relatively have authored a fantastic poem than found a comet.

A century later, a bit woman named Vera had a flash of illumination whereas studying a kids’s ebook about Maria Mitchell: her nightly pastime of gazing wondersmitten on the stars outdoors her bed room window may grow to be a life’s work, work that might culminate in one of many biggest revelations within the historical past of science.

Vera Rubin confirmed the existence of darkish matter by finding out the rotation of galaxies. “I generally ask myself whether or not I’d be finding out galaxies in the event that they have been ugly,” she mirrored in her most private interview — a playful echo of Keats’s poignant postulate that “magnificence is reality, reality magnificence.”

A decade after Vera Rubin returned her borrowed stardust to the universe, the observatory named in her honor opens its oracle eye to the cosmos and blinks again at us the mysteries of ten million vivid galaxies. Atop one of many first pictures captured by the VRO’s 8.4-meter telescope — 678 exposures of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae taken over the course of seven hours, two trillion pixels of cosmic reality mixed right into a single gasp of magnificence — I’ve remixed the textual content of the Nationwide Science Basis press launch right into a poem utilizing my hen divination course of: