![]() Just 40 years prior, Edwin Hubble had determined, for the first time, that Andromeda was a galaxy outside of our own, and that galaxies outside our own even existed. This time, though, she has a cutting-edge telescope and is looking at stars in motion at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy. Not everyone gets to turn their childlike wonder and captivation by the unknown into a career, but Rubin did.įlash-forward to the late 1960s, and she’s at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, doing exactly what she did in that childhood bedroom: tracking the motion of stars. It was that everything we knew about normal matter was insignificant. It wasn’t that everything we knew about matter was wrong. “Ruth remembers Vera constantly crawling over her at night, to be able to open the windows and look out at the night sky and start to track the stars.” Ruth just wanted to sleep, and “there Vera was tinkering and trying to take pictures of the stars and trying to track their motions.” “But the windows captivated Vera’s attention,” Ashley Yeager, a journalist writing a forthcoming biography on Rubin, says. Ruth was older and got to pick her favorite side of the bed, the one that faced the bedroom windows and the night sky. Rubin shared a bedroom and bed with her sister Ruth. Growing up in Washington, DC, in the 1930s, like so many young people getting started in science, Rubin fell in love with the night sky. And they believe so largely because of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who died in 2016 at age 88. Scientists are, to this day, searching for dark matter because they believe it is there to find. The woman who told us how much we don’t know To learn about dark matter is to grapple with, and embrace, the unknown. Still, the search, fueled by faith in scientific observations, continues, despite the possibility that dark matter may never be found. Instead, there could be something more deeply flawed in physicists’ understanding of gravity that would explain it away. It makes some wonder: Have they been chasing a ghost? Dark matter might not be real. And that’s a start.īut how does it end? Though physicists have been trying for decades to figure out what dark matter is, the detectors they built to find it have gone silent year after year. But, at least, we can know the size of our ignorance. This accounting of the unknown is not often a thing that’s celebrated in science. It’s also a reminder that, often, in order to discover something true, the first thing we need to do is account for what we don’t know. The Unexplainable newsletter guides you through the most fascinating, unanswered questions in science - and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them. ![]() The story of dark matter is a reminder that whatever we know, whatever truth about the universe we have acquired as individuals or as a society, is insignificant compared to what we have not yet explained. “But on the other hand, we have brains in our skulls that are like these tiny, gelatinous cantaloupes, and we have figured all of this out.” “I think it gives you intellectual and kind of epistemic humility - that we are simultaneously, super insignificant, a tiny, tiny speck of the universe,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist and dark matter expert, said on a recent phone call. But to this day, no one knows what dark matter actually is. It’s strange even calling all that “normal” matter, because in the grand scheme of the cosmos, normal matter is the rare stuff. Scientists call this unexplained stuff “dark matter,” and they believe there’s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter - the stuff that makes up you and me, stars, planets, black holes, and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth. ![]() Most of the matter in the universe is actually unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered. It turns out all the stars in all the galaxies, in all the universe, barely even begin to account for all the stuff of the universe. You can listen to the episode below (and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!). I’ve been thinking about this feeling - the awesome, terrifying feeling of smallness, of the extreme contrast of the big and small - while reporting on one of the greatest mysteries in science for Unexplainable, a brand new Vox podcast about unanswered questions in science. The beautiful challenge of stargazing is keeping this all in mind: Every small thing we see in the night sky is immense, but what’s even more immense is the unseen, the unknown. And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes, they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe. They appear as tiny points of light, but they are massive infernos. If you go outside on a dark night, in the darkest places on Earth, you can see as many as 9,000 stars.
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