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Rubin died on Sunday at an assisted living facility in
Princeton, New Jersey, and had suffered from dementia for
several years, Allan Rubin, a geosciences professor at Princeton
University, said in an email.
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.
Working with spectrograph designer Kent Ford, Rubin found that
material at galaxies' edges rotated at the same rate as material
in the center. The discovery contradicted a law of physics that
said the greater mass in the center, such as dust, stars and
gas, meant it should move faster than the edge, where there was
less mass.
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 and other astronomers and physicists.
Scientists have discovered that a small part of dark matter is
made of neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that do not
really interact with regular matter.
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 revolutionized
astronomy and the concept of the universe.
The will of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the prizes, "describes
the physics prize as recognizing ‘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.
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 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.
Rubin was on the Georgetown faculty before working at the
Carnegie Institution.
(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,
and Ian Simpson in Washington; editing by Diane Craft)
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