Galaxy Rotation Curve - History and Description of The Problem

History and Description of The Problem

Though in 1932, Jan Hendrik Oort was the first to report measurements that the stars in the Solar neighborhood moved faster than expected when a mass distribution based upon the visible matter was assumed, this measurement was later determined to be essentially erroneous. A few years later, Horace Babcock reported in his PhD thesis measurements of the rotation curve for Andromeda which suggested that the mass-to-luminosity ratio increases radially. He, however, attributed it to either absorption of light within the galaxy or modified dynamics in the outer portions of the spiral and not to any form of missing matter. In 1959, Louise Volders demonstrated that spiral galaxy M33 does not spin as expected according to Keplerian dynamics. Following this, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Vera Rubin, a young astronomer at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington presented findings based on a new sensitive spectrograph that could measure the velocity curve of edge-on spiral galaxies to a greater degree of accuracy than had ever before been achieved. Together with fellow staff-member Kent Ford, Rubin announced at a 1975 meeting of the American Astronomical Society the discovery that most stars in spiral galaxies orbit at roughly the same speed, which implied that their mass densities were uniform well beyond the location with most of the stars (the galactic bulge), a result independently found in 1978. Rubin presented her results in an influential paper in 1980. These results suggest that either Newtonian gravity does not apply universally or that, conservatively, upwards of 50% of the mass of galaxies was contained in the relatively dark galactic halo. Met with skepticism, Rubin insisted that the observations were correct.

Based on Newtonian mechanics and assuming, as was originally thought, that most of the mass of the galaxy had to be in the galactic bulge near the center, matter (such as stars and gas) in the disk portion of a spiral should orbit the center of the galaxy similar to the way in which planets in the solar system orbit the sun, i.e. where the average orbital speed of an object at a specified distance away from the majority of the mass distribution would decrease inversely with the square root of the radius of the orbit (the dashed line in Fig. 1).

Observations of the rotation curve of spirals, however, do not bear this out. Rather, the curves do not decrease in the expected inverse square root relationship but are "flat", i.e. outside of the central bulge the speed is nearly a constant (the solid line in Fig. 1). If a substantial amount of matter far from the center of the galaxy that is not emitting light in the mass-to-light ratio of the central bulge is assumed, the rotation curves can be explained. The material responsible for the extra mass was dubbed, "dark matter", the existence of which was first posited in the 1930s by Jan Oort in his measurements of the Oort constants and Fritz Zwicky in his studies of the masses of galaxy clusters, though these proposals were left unexplored until after Rubin's work was accepted as correct. The existence of non-baryonic cold dark matter (CDM) is today a major feature of the Lambda-CDM model that describes the cosmology of the universe.