NATS 1740 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Dark Matter, Vera Rubin

• School: York University
• Department: Natural Science
• Course: NATS 1740
• Professor: Alireza Rafiee

Document Summary

In 1930 an astronomer fritz zwicky, observed a dense knot of galaxies 300 million light years away visible only in x-ray light. The hot plasma gas exerts an outwards force which must be matched by the force of gravity to remain in equilibrium. When the astronomer added up the matter in all the galaxies, he determined that the gravitational pull of the galaxies wasn"t enough to overcome the expansion of the gas, there was matter missing. Vera rubin made the discovery that stars in galaxies were orbiting too fast, and they were stable. The possible reasoning being that there is invisible matter floating around in our galaxies having a gravitational influence on them. The next observation was the afterglow light patter from the early years of the universe. The light is uniform in 1 part to 10,000, but underneath are tiny variations and bumps.