A pioneering astronomer who helped find powerful evidence of dark matter has died. Vera Rubin was 88. Allan Rubin said his mother died of natural causes on Sunday. He says the Philadelphia native had been living in the Princeton, New Jersey, area.
Rubin found that galaxies don't quite rotate the way they were predicted, and that lent support to the theory that some other force is at work, namely dark matter. Dark matter, which hasn't been directly observed, makes up 27 per cent of universe as opposed to 5 per cent of the universe being normal matter.
In 1974, Rubin also discovered that the stars at the edges of galaxies moved faster than expected. Reportedly, gravity calculations using only visible matter in galaxies showed that the outer stars should have been moving more slowly. To reconcile her observations with the law of gravity, scientists proposed there was matter we cannot see and called it dark matter. Scientists better understand what dark matter isn't rather than what it is. Rubin's scientific achievements earned her numerous honors, including becoming the second female astronomer to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
With inputs from PTI
