W. (William) Kent Ford Jr. (born 1931) is an astronomer involved with the theory of

dark matter Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. Dark matter is called "dark" because it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not a ...

. He worked with scientist

Vera Rubin Vera Florence Cooper Rubin (; July 23, 1928 – December 25, 2016) was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by study ...

, who used his advanced spectrometer in her studies of space and matter. This spectrometer allowed the pair to drastically change the way dark matter was viewed, by analyzing the various spectrums of light galaxies give off in different parts of their spirals. He received the 1985

James Craig Watson Medal 400px, James Craig Watson Medal The James Craig Watson Medal was established by the bequest of James Craig Watson, an astronomer the University of Michigan between 1863 and 1879, and is awarded every 1-4 years by the U.S. National Academy of Scien ...

for his work on image enhancement and galactic dynamics.

Work

Imaging tube development

Starting in 1955, when he was hired at the Carnegie Institute's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ford worked on improving the

electrostatic photomultiplier Photomultiplier tubes (photomultipliers or PMTs for short) are extremely sensitive detectors of light in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are members of the class of vacuum tubes, more speci ...

tube and developing it as an instrument for scientific work, and went on to pioneer the application of photomultiplier tubes as a sensitive focal-plane detector for astronomical applications, resulting in the "Carnegie Image Tube". The first tests of the astronomical applications of his barrier film tubes were done on the 26-inch refractor at the Naval Observatory in Washington, and later at the 40-inch telescope at the Naval Observatory in Flagstaff. By making it possible for astronomical observations to be captured in electronic form, and thus easily transferred to digital form for analysis by computer, the technology revolutionized the data collection method of observational astronomy, and the technology continued to be widely used for astronomical observations until the development of CCD imagers in the 1980s.

Observational astronomy

In an important paper co-authored with astronomer

in 1970, and a follow-up paper in 1980,V. C. Rubin, W. K. Ford, Jr., & N. Thonnard,
Rotational properties of 21 SC galaxies with a large range of luminosities and radii, from NGC 4605 /R = 4kpc/ to UGC 2885 /R = 122 kpc/
, ''Astrophysical Journal, Part 1, vol. 238,'' June 1, 1980, p. 471-487. Retrieved 29 March 2019. Rubin and Ford established that the orbits of stars around the center of galaxies (the " galaxy rotation curve") does not decrease with distance from the galactic center, as expected from Kepler's rotation law, but remains constant (or "flat") with distance. They deduced from this that galaxies contain a large fraction of their mass in the form of some non-luminous component, and calculated that most galaxies must contain about six times as much dark as visible mass. The name now given to this discovery is

Notes

References

Vera Rubin and Dark Matter
at the American Museum of Natural History

External links