from the changing-our-understanding-of-the-universe dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] Renowned astrophysicist and National Medal of Science awardee Vera Rubin passed away in Princeton N.J., the evening of December 25, 2016, at the age of 88. Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter—the invisible material that makes up more than 90% of the mass of the universe. She was a retired staff astronomer at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C.
"Vera Rubin was a national treasure as an accomplished astronomer and a wonderful role model for young scientists," remarked Carnegie president Matthew Scott. "We are very saddened by this loss."
In the 1960s, Rubin's interest in how stars orbit their galactic centers led her and colleague Kent Ford to study the Andromeda galaxy, M31, a nearby spiral. The two scientists wanted to determine the distribution of mass in M31 by looking at the orbital speeds of stars and gas at varying distances from the galactic center. They expected the speeds to conform to Newtonian gravitational theory, whereby an object farther from its central mass orbits slower than those closer in. To their surprise, the scientists found that stars far from the center traveled as fast as those near the center.
After observing dozens more galaxies by the 1970s, Rubin and colleagues found that something other than the visible mass was responsible for the stars' motions. Each spiral galaxy is embedded in a "halo" of dark matter—material that does not emit light and extends beyond the optical galaxy. They found it contains 5 to 10 times as much mass as the luminous galaxy. As a result of Rubin's groundbreaking work, it has become apparent that more than 90% of the universe is composed of this invisible material. The first inkling that dark matter existed came in 1933 when Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky of Caltech proposed it. But it was not until Rubin's work that dark matter was confirmed.
Besides her remarkable scientific contributions, as noted by colleague Neta Bahcall of Princeton University: "Vera was an amazing scientist and an amazing human being. A pioneering astronomer, the 'mother' of flat rotation curves and dark-matter, a champion of women in science, a mentor and role model to generations of astronomers."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday December 30 2016, @01:31AM
She died a few days ago, and has been all over news media for some reason (she isn't a Kardashian, doesn't have a sex tape, sux2bu) for 3 days now.
IMHO, if the editors can't publish a story like this within a day or two they shouldn't publish it at all. Have we had the Carrie Fisher died thread yet?
Not knocking her accomplishments nor importance, just saying be timely with this stuff.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30 2016, @01:44AM
It's the holiday season and it took ages for anybody to submit the summary.
There's more folks interested in Star Wars than are interested enough and knowledgeable enough about her accomplishments to cover it.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday December 30 2016, @01:54AM
You miss my point. Happened 3 days ago and I'm guessing 90% of Soylent readers had already heard of it. Either greenlight it within 24 hours, or admit you lost it and pass.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 4, Informative) by edIII on Friday December 30 2016, @02:53AM
Apparently everyone else missed mine. You could submit it, and could've submitted it 3 days ago. I admonished others in the same way. Everyone fucking bitching about it, but nobody fucking writing anything, submitting anything, etc.
Staff came out and said this was submitted via IRC and slated for, wait for it, *right now*. If you objected so damn much, like somebody else in Carrie Fisher's thread, you could have been submitting it too.
All that bitching, and no submitting. I left it alone because it was already in the queue finally and had no idea what to write. Apparently, you may have had an idea.
A bunch of entitled mother fuckers around here. Almost as if it was a paid for site by you, with paid staff, or ran completely automatically. This site is as good as the comments and the submissions.
SO SUBMIT!
Geez
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday December 30 2016, @03:25AM
Apparently, i'm one of the 10% who have missed this due to family, work, holiday celebrating, Apples to Apples, Catan, euchre, etc.
I don't know how people can bitch and whine about this site: it may not be big and professional like GNU, (lol),but i like it. I wish i were rich, so i could pay some people here, but i'm not, so i either submit or i don't bitch about submissions.
Time is so precious that there are times i come here just to catch up on the nerd stuff.
Keep it up, Soylent staff. And brush away the whine. (I like red whine, by the way). :)
At least when i read something here, i get all sides (i even like hearing the Trump vs HRC stuff) and i get informed. When i read, say, CNN, i get one side.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30 2016, @04:42AM
I'm fine with this story, and even many of the "non news for nerds" ones. Not everything has to be about black hole event horizons and such.
I'd appreciate no more non-tech political flamebait that is just a welcome mat for all the usual rants. Even if the submitter was passionate about the story - of course, he wants to join in the rants.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday December 30 2016, @05:12AM
Look pal, most of us let the green site over shit like what you are pulling.
Nobody has named you the emperor of Soylent, so turn it down a bit.
I did not reply to your previous comment, whcih I found authoritarian (I giving jelizondo an hour!) out of courtesy.
But now I see you have some stuff up your ass, so go have a shit and stop being an arse.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday December 30 2016, @05:52AM
What am I pulling again? Calling you on your stupid abusive bullshit? Fuck you pal.
Then leave this site. We don't need fuckers that abuse the site, complain about when articles appear, don't appear, whatever. YOU had the power to submit something, but instead needed to inappropriately admonish the staff during an article about somebody else's death.
I'm not acting like the emperor, but a fucking tour guide if anything. Explaining to your stupid fucking ass how the site works, how you can submit stories, etc.
Fuck all you fucking whiners that don't step up to contribute to the site, but complain about it, wheeeeeeennnnn those very same contributions would eliminate your complaints.
In other words, shut the fuck up you backseat driving mother fucker.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 30 2016, @02:40PM
This is how you know what edIII is saying is true. A person paid to edit a site like this would never tell you to go fuck yourself.
This is a community built by volunteers. They react like any normal person would to jabs. In case critics on this incident have never volunteered for anything before, an all-volunteer endeavor is only as good as the will of the community to pitch in and, you know, volunteer.
Step up and offer to fix any gaps in the community you perceive. Complaints without action are worth nothing. If you don't have 5 minutes to submit the story you feel is missing, then the most the volunteers can be expected to entertain is constructive criticism, delivered in the friendliest, gentlest manner possible.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday December 30 2016, @04:27PM
Apparently you believe that submitting stories is all there is. I see three components: submitting stories, posting comments and financial support.
I object to your calling Soylentils “entitled mother fuckers” for not submitting stories, that reduces the level of conversation at Soylent to that of 4chan and insults those of us who post comments and provide financial support, which is two-thirds of Soylent.
I object to your “admonishing” people. It is a curious choice of words, why not ask, request or appeal? That verb is used by someone in power talking to an underling.
So get a grip. Get a life.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:21AM
Again, fuck you. Your complaint was unwarranted and stupid. You could submit the story. It was obviously important to you.
Yes, you come off as an entitled mother fucker when you *specifically* complain about the lack of a story when you are very able to submit same story.
Nothing you can say can erase the stupidity of your original post, and how baseless and offensive your attacks against SN were.
Step up, or shut up.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:37AM
Fuck you too, you motherfucker!
If that is the level of conversation you're used to, fine I can deal with cocksuckers like you all day.
I'm too fucking old to be scared by childish foul language.
Now go and take that giant cock off your ass.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday December 30 2016, @08:35AM
I don't. Other submitting stories as it takes hours, if not days, to appear on the front page.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 30 2016, @02:34PM
My goodness. It was done this way so the editors and others could take time off over Christmas to spend time with their families. It was by design this time. Normally you can submit a story and see it appear on the front page before the end of the day (end of the day defined globally, because Soylentils live all over the world).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday January 01 2017, @03:05AM
The submit queue tends to normally have stories stacked up for 24 hours at least, because of this desire to have continuous drip feeding of stories.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 30 2016, @02:31PM
Snotnose, part of that might be my fault. In the week leading up to Christmas I submitted something like 67 stories and encouraged others to submit, too, so the editors could schedule them in and take time off to be with their families over the holiday. They interleaved those with submissions from many others (thanks for submitting, everyone), so I'm sure the story queue was on automatic for at least a couple days past Christmas. In fact I think edIII said as much a couple days ago when the first complaints about not reporting Vera's death surfaced.
So I think we're looking at a heavily front-loaded queue and a major holiday when people were AFK. You might consider that and cut everyone a little slack on this one. You could also step up and submit or help out when you see a deficiency that's bothering you, because this is a community site built by volunteers.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Troll) by BK on Friday December 30 2016, @03:28AM
I, for one, visit this site for the discussion more than the news. Lots of sites give news that is left (NYT), right (WSJ), fake (cnn, nbc, abc, bbc, cbs, pbs, fox, onion, common dreams, zero hedge, mother jones, huffington, politico, the hill, breitbart, etc.) or timely.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday December 30 2016, @05:01AM
Not knocking her accomplishments nor importance, just saying be timely with this stuff.
Well some of the alleged accomplishments need to be knocked, because nobody has discovered or confirmed dark matter.
The theory is closer to getting tossed out on its ear as it is to having the first hint of a confirmation or actual discovery in meat space.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Friday December 30 2016, @01:34AM
"Dark Matter" has always seemed to me to be a concept by which one adds to only one side of an equation to make it "work out", rather than an actual substance or class of substances.
If your cosmological math isn't working out, add some dark matter to the side with less. How much? Until it balances. No measurement needed....
No disrespect to Vera Rubin intended; just because I don't understand what she worked on doesn't mean it isn't valid or important.
But, the idea that 90% of the mass of the universe is made of mysterious invisibility is kind of jarring. Is it invisible strings, in theory?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday December 30 2016, @01:38AM
all she did was confirm that 3 = 1+1 if you add another 'something' to the equation (1+1+something=3.... PROFIT!)
There is no 'confirmation'. It is still an unconfirmed 'theory'.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by BK on Friday December 30 2016, @04:53AM
bbbbbbut CONSENSUS!
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 1) by theronb on Friday December 30 2016, @04:26PM
Sure, but the point of speculative theories is to point to where there might be an opportunity for interesting research - and grant requests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30 2016, @02:46AM
It is literally 3D epicycles. There is a spheroid of invisible stuff that needs to be placed around each galaxy (each spheroid unique to that galaxy) to "explain" the observations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter_halo [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Friday December 30 2016, @03:19AM
A large number of scientific theories start out that way, as fudge factors when things don’t quite work out. 19th century astronomers saw the observed ephemeris of Uranus did not conform to the computed ephemerides of the planet based on Newton’s laws. What did they do? They hypothesised the existence of another planet, and sure enough, they later found Neptune.
Similarly, Vera Rubin and others note that galaxies are rotating faster than they should be, Fritz Zwicky makes some gravitational estimates of the mass of the Coma Cluster and finds numbers that are way off judging from the visible matter, other folks observe galactic clusters colliding and gravitational lenses where there is no visible matter [wikipedia.org], people studying the cosmic microwave background see anomalous spikes that cannot be explained by the behaviour of normal matter, and so on. So no, it isn’t “no measurement required”. It has in fact been pinned down by various indirect measurements.
The other alternative is to modify the laws of gravity. However, for that to work you have to make a consistent modification to gravity that works at all scales, from terrestrial, to planetary, to stellar, to galactic, to galactic cluster, all the way to cosmological. This is why dark matter is so successful: it is too diffuse to affect things up to and including stellar scale, it is dense enough to affect cluster and cosmological scales in line with observation, and in the quantities required to support cluster and cosmological observations, there should be enough to affect galactic scales, though arguments still persist about the specifics. In contrast while you can construct a modified gravity that works at galactic scales while not screwing up the lower scales, all such attempts so far have failed to get to the larger scales without adding something that looks suspiciously like dark matter.
The only problem with dark matter is it’s proving fiendishly difficult to pin down its precise nature. The theory of dark matter says that such dark matter particles should be heavy and should interact only via gravity and possibly the weak interaction. The trouble is that gravity and the weak interaction are extremely weak forces. The neutrino is one example of such a particle that can only interact by these two forces and it has proved very challenging to detect (we still can’t detect very low energy neutrinos), but it is too light to be a good candidate for dark matter.
The prospect of dark matter is probably jarring in the way that the contemporaries of Copernicus and Galileo felt when faced with the prospect that the Earth (and hence they) were not the centre of the universe. It’s saying that not only are we not at the centre of the universe, furthermore we’re not even made up of the same kind of matter that the vast majority of the universe is made up of!
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday December 30 2016, @04:16AM
Just assume there's a "screening factor" to the gravity law, pretty much as the electric force damps in the presence of dielectrics. Compute then the "gravitational permittivity" and you have a testable theory potentially testable in the lab (assuming the instruments are sensitive enough).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 30 2016, @11:45AM
Dark matter is also a testable theory. Guess what people are searching for in accelerators? (Besides supersymmetric particles, of course).
Of course there is a chance that it ultimately turns out that it doesn't exist, but that's exactly what science is about. Neptun, the planet conjectured to explain the deviation s of Neptune's movement from the predictions, turned out to be real. Vulcan, the planet conjectured to explain the deviation of Mercury's movement from the predictions, turned out not to be real; rather the deviations were explained by a new theory of gravitation, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Also note that Einstein did not find that theory by looking at the movement of Mercury, and would never have found it that way.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 30 2016, @12:06PM
This of course should have read:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday December 30 2016, @01:53PM
With respect, Neptune isn't invisible [space.com].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday December 30 2016, @02:57PM
It is, with the naked eye, as seen from earth.
But then, we know there exists matter which fulfils all properties of dark matter, with one exception: There's not enough of it around. Which is neutrinos.
Interestingly, Neutrinos also started out as something just introduced because the equations didn't add up. In that case, the conservation laws on beta decay. When they were introduced, people thought they would never be detected. Today, there is no doubt that neutrinos exist.
So strictly speaking, the question should not be whether dark matter exists (it does, in the form of neutrinos), but whether enough of it exists to explain the observations (the neutrinos alone are not sufficient, as their collective mass is too small).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jelizondo on Friday December 30 2016, @05:18AM
No, Vera did not “invent” dark matter. Quite the contrary, dark matter had to be invented to account for her observations of the rotational speed of galaxies which does not appear to follow Newton’s laws.
As Asimov put it, ‘The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …” ‘ And Vera led to one of those “funny” moments when physical observations do not match the math.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday December 30 2016, @01:34AM
I discovered Teletubbies are real (saw them on TV, and i have also confirmed the existence of bloody Unicorns.
They are here:
http://pbfcomics.com/253/ [pbfcomics.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30 2016, @03:10AM
Oh wow, I'd almost forgotten all about that demented comic. :)
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Friday December 30 2016, @01:43AM
Oh I get it, some scientist who did amazing work and helped to get others into science is talked about but when a scientist dies doing REAL science like Piers Sellers the editors turn a blind eye and don't think it would be interesting to the community. It is getting worse and worse here every day. Probably all the dirty political hacks refusing to talk about what is going on with our climate and trying to cover up events going on that effect progress.
The above comment was meant to be seen as funny and to in no way denegrate V. Rubin or P. Sellers, both seem to have done excellent work and will be missed. I am glad that after seeing this brought up in the thread about the woman from Starwars that it actually made the front page as it is an interesting read. Rubin had a lot of pretty great acomplishments under her belt.
If 2016 wasn't almost over and we were to be freed from this deadly year I would suggest a "this week in science" deaths talking about those who have left the community behind and the contributions to their fields while they were here. If I had not been looking for an excuse to complain in this thread like is done in every other thread I would not have known about P. Sellers. He had served some time on the ISS as well.
http://www.itechpost.com/articles/68122/20161224/piers-sellers-death-climate-scientist-dies-61.htm [itechpost.com]
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 30 2016, @02:45PM
Why not compose that story and submit it?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 30 2016, @02:43AM
I'm getting depressed with all the deaths in the news. A little levity, alright? Only the good die young, and Vera Rubin was forced to hang around until 88.
Fek. It's not as funny as I hoped. What sucks even worse is when they are my age (Like Princess Leaia) or even younger.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday December 30 2016, @03:22AM
The guy that's responsible for the red solo cups also died. Is this the place where we whine about the submissions while not actually caring enough to submit one?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30 2016, @03:46AM
I get that we'd like to give shotouts to female physicists, but "dark matter confirmed"? That's an insult, not a show of respecgt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30 2016, @05:03AM
of the basic structure of the DNA molecule was played by Rosalind Franklin?
OK, I'm leaving.