US’ Pioneering Dark Matter Astronomer, Vera Rubin, Dies at 88

Rubin’s colleagues felt that she was overlooked for a Nobel Prize.

Vera Rubin helped find powerful evidence of dark matter. ( Photo : AP)

Vera Rubin, a US astronomer whose pioneering work on invisible dark matter in the universe was overlooked for a Nobel Prize, has died at 88, her son reported on Monday.

Rubin, a Philadelphia native, used galaxies’ rotations to discover the first direct evidence of dark matter in the 1970s while working at the Carnegie Institution in Washington.

Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Washington, told Astronomy Magazine in June that Rubin deserved the Nobel Prize since the discovery of dark matter had revolutionised astronomy and the concept of the universe.

The will of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the prizes, "describes the physics prize as recognising 'the most important discovery' within the field of physics. If dark matter doesn't fit that description, I don't know what does," Levesque said.

She was the second female astronomer to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Working with spectrograph designer Kent Ford, Rubin found that material at galaxies' edges rotated at the same rate as material in the centre. The discovery contradicted a law of physics that stipulated that greater mass in the centre, such as dust, stars and gas, meant it should move faster than the edge, where the mass was less.

Scientists have discovered that a small part of dark matter is made of neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that in general, do not interact with regular matter.

The explanation was a halo of dark matter around the galaxies that spread mass throughout the galaxies. Dark matter has not been directly observed but has been inferred through work by Rubin as well as other astronomers and physicists.

Rubin died on Sunday at an assisted living facility in Princeton, New Jersey. Allan Rubin, a Geosciences professor at Princeton University mentioned in an email that she had been suffering from dementia for several years.

Rubin graduated from Vassar College in 1948 with a degree in astronomy. She earned a master's degree from Cornell University and a doctorate from Georgetown University in Washington. She was on the Georgetown faculty before working at the Carnegie Institution.