Friday, October 07, 2016

The mother of dark matter

vis DavidReneke's blog;

Vera Rubin discovered dark matter, and everyone ignored her and then she didn't win a Nobel Prize


Vera Rubin is an American astronomer who uncovered the mystery of the angular motion of galaxies. This famous astronomer carved herself a well-deserved place in history, so why doesn’t the Nobel committee see it that way?
In the late 1970s, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford of the Carnegie Institution of Washington stared, confused, at the punch-card readouts from their observations of the Andromeda Galaxy. The vast spiral seemed to be rotating all wrong. The stuff at the edges was moving just as fast as the stuff near the center, apparently violating Newton’s Laws of Motion (which also govern how the planets move around our Sun). While the explanation for that strange behavior didn’t become clear to Rubin until two years later, these printouts represented the first direct evidence of dark matter.
Scientists now know that dark matter comprises some 84 percent of the universe’s material. Its invisible particles swarm and stream and slam through the whole cosmos. It affects how stars move within galaxies, how galaxies tug on each other, and how all that matter clumped together in the first place. It is to the cosmos like air is to humans: ubiquitous, necessary, unseen but felt.
The discovery of this strange substance deserves a Nobel Prize. But, for Rubin, none has come, although she has long been a “people’s choice” and predicted winner.

read the whole thing.

wikipedia page.

Discrimination against women in science was real back then. Rosalind Franklin is another example as is Rosalyn Yallow....(when I went to medical school, only 5 percent of doctors were women, and less than ten percent of my class were women...)

 I predate modern feminism, and dislike how it has become hijacked, at least in the media, by radical leaders who have other agendas but use feminism as a front.

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