"To my mind, what Vera discovered is both more specific and more profound than the dark matter paradigm it helped to create. What she discovered observationally is that rotation curves are very nearly flat, and continue to be so to indefinitely large radius. Over and over again, for every galaxy in the sky. It is a law of nature for galaxies, akin to Kepler’s laws for planets. Dark matter is an inference, a subsidiary result. It is just one possible interpretation, a subset of amazing and seemingly unlikely possibilities opened up by her discovery."
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Jews from the United StatesPeople from PhiladelphiaWomen from the United StatesNational Medal of Science laureatesAstronomers from the United States
Original Language: English
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(14 January 2017)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin
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Vera Rubin
Vera Rubin (23 July 1928 – 25 December 2016) was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. Her magnum opus was the uncovering of the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion, by studying galactic rotation curves. This phenomena became known as the galaxy rotation problem.
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