Vera Rubin has died | Hacker News Reader

Vera Rubin has died

carnegiescience.edu

181 pointsbryanrasmussen11 comments

It's probably worth noting that the strongest proof of dark matter are observations of the bullet galaxy, which Vera Rubin was not involved with as far as I can tell. Some kinds of MOND (which tries to avoid the need for dark matter to explain the current state of the universe) purports to be able to explain Rubin's observations, although they cannot yet explain the bullet galaxy.

I mention this because "confirmed" is a strong word for something that we still have very little direct evidence for, other than observing the proper motion of galaxies. That's pretty strong evidence, but it'd be really cool to be able to detect the stuff directly.

Strong orthogonal evidence for the existence of dark matter is its success in explaining a variety of cosmological effects, notably the properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evid... for an overview.

+1 for clarification. The LUX experiment in South Dakota has been unable to find the evidence of Dark Matter.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/12/dark-matter-still-super-hard-t...

Ground based experiments are testing particular models of dark matter. We know it (or some modification of gravity) exists due to its gravitational effects. Direct detection could potentially rule out the modified gravity explanation, and tell us more about what it is, but it appears disfavoured anyway (due to bullet cluster et.al.).

The only models of modified gravity I know that are more than ad hoc modifications of individual equations, and are actually complete theories, introduce new fields anyway (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor%E2%80%93vector%E2%80%93...).

Additional matter appears to be an unavoidable consequence of her discovery. What remains open is the type of matter.

As others have pointed out, there are over a half dozen independent lines of evidence for something like dark matter. Prople hope more evidence such as the direct mechanical detection of WIMPS- not seen so far.

I was very surprised to hear this story carried on my local nightly news here in Philadelphia. Seems she was a Philadelphia native at one point.

I am having difficulty reconciling "native" and "at one point". Do you mean she was born in Philadelphia?

The reports at 6abc (from AP) and at nbcphiladelphia say merely "Philadelphia native". She was born July 23, 1928 in Philadelphia [1] and moved from there to D.C. at age ten [2]. [1]: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rubin-vera-cooper (which lists a few references that I am not going to look up right now) [2]: http://www.marciabartusiak.com/uploads/8/5/8/9/8589314/spins...

This comment is why I love hacker news. Pendantic, yet informative.

Don't mean to be pedantic, but do you mean pedantic?

Pedanception!

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