{"id":494,"date":"2020-12-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-25T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anyonecanscience.com\/?p=494"},"modified":"2020-12-23T21:34:13","modified_gmt":"2020-12-24T02:34:13","slug":"the-ghosts-of-science-past-part-3-vera-rubin-and-the-mysteries-of-dark-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anyonecanscience.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/25\/the-ghosts-of-science-past-part-3-vera-rubin-and-the-mysteries-of-dark-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ghosts of Science Past: Part 3\u2014Vera Rubin and the Mysteries of Dark Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rounding out our trio of influential women<\/a> in science<\/a> is astronomer Vera Rubin, whose observations and calculations provided the first empirical evidence of a mysterious unseen entity lurking throughout the universe. In the 1970s, while observing the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, Rubin and her collaborator Kent Ford noticed that the stars in this spiral galaxy appeared to defy the fundamental laws of physics. The entire galaxy, it seemed, was spinning at the same speed\u2014despite most of the mass being concentrated in the center. In fact, the outer stars were moving so fast that they should have been hurled out of the galaxy completely as their inertia exceeded the stabilizing hold of gravity. But the stars seemed stable enough in their rapid orbits. Rubin calculated that, for Andromeda to spiral in this way, there must be at least ten times as much mass in the galaxy than what was expected based on visible stars. But where is that mass, and why can\u2019t we observe it? Physicists have come to call this invisible material dark matter. Dark matter may just hold our entire universe together, and the mystery of its identity has haunted physicists for the past several decades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Vera Rubin was fascinated with astronomy<\/a> from a young age. By twelve, she routinely spent her nights watching the movement of the stars through the sky using a cardboard telescope her father helped her build. During the day, she would go to the library and read books about astronomy\u2014after gaining written permission from her mother to check out books from the adult readers section. And every night, she came back to those curiously moving stars. \u201cWhat fascinated me was that if I opened my eyes during the night, they had all rotated around the pole,\u201d Rubin said in a 1995 interview for the American Institute of Physics<\/a>. \u201cAnd I found it inconceivable. I just was captured.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A invisible cache of dark matter holds galaxies together.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

While her parents were supportive of her interest in astronomy, many of Rubin\u2019s teachers were less than encouraging. At the time, there was very little precedent for women interested in the field. The only female astronomer Rubin knew about at the time was Maria Mitchell<\/a>\u2014the first woman to study astronomy professionally in the United States. Mitchell taught at Vassar College from 1865\u20131888 and was a director of the observatory there. Inspired by Mitchell\u2019s scientific journey, Rubin decided to apply to Vassar for her undergraduate degree and was accepted with a scholarship. She was the only astronomy major in her class, and she graduated after three years in 1948. The same year, Rubin married a physical chemist and joined him at Cornell University, where she worked on completing a master\u2019s in astronomy and had her first child. Rubin\u2019s master thesis on the velocity distribution of galaxies was met with backlash and skepticism at the time, but she would ultimately return to build upon it years later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After getting her master\u2019s, Rubin took a break to raise her son, but she found herself incessantly drawn back to Astronomy. \u201cAfter a few months of being out of school, I wanted to learn more,\u201d Rubin wrote in her 2011 autobiography<\/a>. \u201cI would push David to the playground, sit him in the sandbox and read the Astrophysical Journal<\/em>.\u201d In the end, it was her husband who encouraged her to pursue a PhD from Georgetown University after their family moved to DC. At Georgetown, Rubin studied under George Gamow\u2014a nuclear physicist and<\/em> cosmologist who was an early proponent of the \u201cBig Bang\u201d theory and the originator of the \u201cliquid drop\u201d model of atomic structure (which was crucial to Lise Meitner\u2019s<\/a> explanation of nuclear fission).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After earning her PhD in 1954, Rubin taught astronomy at Georgetown for ten more years. In 1965, she was offered the chance to make observations using the Carnegie telescope at Palomar, a facility that wasn\u2019t normally available to women. In fact, Rubin notes in her autobiography that the building only had a men\u2019s restroom\u2014she recalls covering up the door sign with her own crude drawing of a \u201cskirted woman.\u201d The experience at Palomar reminded her of the love she had for observing the stars. Shortly after, she left her teaching position at Georgetown for a research position at the Carnegie Institute where she met Kent Ford. Ford had just developed a uniquely powerful spectrometer<\/a> that could pick apart the light from individual stars in distant galaxies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"At
At a distance, the Andromeda galaxy looks like little more than a smudge of light. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When looking at stars in other galaxies, resolution is a big issue. Any telescope has a diffraction limit\u2014the absolute smallest distance between two objects that it can discern from a given distance. Eyes have diffraction limits too (check out this physics question on how big Legolas\u2019 eyes<\/a> must be to see as well as he can in LOTR<\/em>), which is why you can\u2019t read very small text from far away. You can think of diffraction limit as the pixel size of the world you, or your telescope, can see. If you look up at the night sky, what you might call \u201cstars\u201d is often really a cluster of stars, but at that distance, all those stars melt together into a single \u201cpixel\u201d of light. The Andromeda galaxy, one of the closest galaxies to Earth, can actually be seen by the naked eye<\/a> (from the Northern hemisphere on a clear night). It appears as a fuzzy patch of light. Even with a fairly powerful telescope, it is difficult to pick apart the individual stars in that galaxy. That\u2019s where Ford\u2019s spectrometer comes in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A spectrometer splits apart light into different wavelengths, making it easier to separate them out and categorize them. Ford\u2019s spectrometer used special photomultipliers\u2014 devices that sensitively convert photons of light into electrical signals to create photographic plates. This special spectrometer made it possible for Rubin and Ford to dissect distant galaxies and determine how they work. They turned their gaze to the Andromeda galaxy to look more closely at how its individual stars rotated. Galaxies, much like solar systems, have the most mass concentrated in the center, so it is reasonable to assume that the objects in the center would rotate the fastest. In our solar system, for example, Mercury orbits the sun over eight times faster<\/a> than Neptune. This property is all about the center of gravity and inertia, and all rotating systems behave in this way. Think about how an ice skater spins for example. Going into the spin, they pull their arms into their body as tightly as possible. This allocates more of their mass to the center, speeding them up. When they want to slow back down, they may stretch out their arms again to disperse their mass and reduce their speed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The Andromeda galaxy contains trillions of stars swirling around a massive, supermassive black hole at the center. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

According to the basic physics of rotating objects, Rubin and Ford expected that the velocity of stars in the Andromeda galaxy would decrease in proportion to their distance from the center, but that\u2019s not what they found. Instead, all the stars seemed to be traveling at the same speed. Even at the fringes of the galaxy, where the gravity holding the stars together should be weak, the stars were still rotating around the center at the same breakneck speed. Instead of being hurled out of the galaxy, like unseatbelted children flung out of a cheap carnival ride, the stars at the periphery of the Andromeda galaxy seemed to be held in place by some invisible force. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rubin and Ford quickly started taking observations of other nearby galaxies and kept getting the same results: the stars were all moving at the same speed, pinned in place by a gravitational force much stronger than predicted. The idea of \u201cdark matter\u201d was theoretically proposed<\/a> in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky, but it was mostly disregarded as conjecture until Rubin and Ford\u2019s startling results came to light in the 60s and 70s. Since that initial demonstration, no one has been able to identify a culprit for dark matter. The suspects<\/a> range from inconceivably small subatomic particles\u2014smaller than even an electron\u2014to massive, slow-moving particles or even solar-sized black holes<\/a> left behind from the dawn of time. But thanks to Rubin\u2019s extensive characterization of galaxy rotation, few scientists can dispute that dark matter exists\u2014and it may even be more prevalent than \u201clight\u201d matter. \u201cIn a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of 10,\u201d Rubin said in an interview in 2000<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance-to-knowledge. We\u2019re out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite never winning a Nobel prize, Rubin did gain recognition<\/a> for her discovery. She was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1981, and in 1993, she was awarded a National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton. All four of her children have also pursued doctorates in science. She died in 2016 at the age of 88 on Christmas Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Vera
Vera Rubin at a NASA conference in 2009.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Comment below or email me at contact@anyonecanscience.com<\/a> to let me know what you think about this week\u2019s blog post and tell me what sorts of topics you want me to cover in the future. Check out last month\u2019s<\/a> series<\/a> on space power<\/a> and subscribe below for weekly science posts sent straight to your email!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rounding out our trio of influential women in science is astronomer Vera Rubin, whose observations and calculations provided the first empirical evidence of a mysterious unseen entity lurking throughout the universe. In the 1970s, while observing the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, Rubin and her collaborator Kent Ford noticed that the stars in this spiral galaxy appeared to defy the fundamental laws of physics. The entire galaxy, it seemed, was spinning at the same speed\u2014despite most of the mass being concentrated in the center. In fact, the outer stars were moving so fast that they should have been hurled out of the…<\/p>\n

Continue readingThe Ghosts of Science Past: Part 3\u2014Vera Rubin and the Mysteries of Dark Matter<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"For the last post in our influential women of science series, we\u2019re talking about Vera Rubin and the discovery of the enigmatic material known as dark matter. Happy Holidays! SYCBHTM To Mom will be back on the 8th of January. #VeraRubin #WomenofScience","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[201],"tags":[214,212,213,211,215,210],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-of-science","tag-andromeda-galaxy","tag-astronomy","tag-astrophysics","tag-dark-matter","tag-spiral-galaxies","tag-vera-rubin","entry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ghosts of Science Past: Part 3\u2014Vera Rubin and the Mysteries of Dark Matter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the 1970s, while observing the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, Rubin and her collaborator Kent Ford noticed that the stars in this spiral galaxy appeared to defy the fundamental laws of physics. 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