Over the years, there have always been things astronomers didn’t understand. 🌌 In the early 20th century, they started using a term for small anomalies that made no sense unless there was something they couldn’t see: dark matter. 🌑
This is Vera Rubin. At 14, she built her own telescope. 🔭 She pursued a career in astronomy and faced significant challenges as a woman in academia. She learned two crucial things: first, being a woman would complicate her academic life, and second, the Doppler effect. 🌈
The Doppler effect means light is bluer when the source moves towards the observer and redder when it moves away. When a light source rotates, one half is bluer, and the other half is redder. This should also apply to galaxies, with the center rotating faster than the edges. However, when Rubin studied our nearest galaxy, the colors were uniform. Everything rotated at the same speed, much faster than expected. 🌠
Rubin quickly checked other galaxies and found the same phenomenon. Galaxies seemed to be enveloped in a halo of invisible matter that accelerated their rotation with its gravity. This additional matter held together all the stars, gas, and dust but didn’t interact with light at all. It wasn’t a “small anomaly”; it was everywhere. 🌌
Vera Rubin was the first to provide reliable evidence of dark matter, calculating that it makes up about 85% of the universe’s matter. Today, scientists still face the challenge of detecting and studying dark matter particles. Until then, the mystery of what holds galaxies together remains.
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A video by @scienseed4294 for Ventana al conocimiento
