The Doppler Universe

If you are a fan of the Doppler effect, then time trials at the Indy 500 Speedway will floor you.  Even if you have experienced the fall in pitch of a passing train whistle while stopped in your car at a railroad crossing, or heard the falling whine of a jet passing overhead, I can guarantee that you have never heard anything like an Indy car passing you by at 225 miles an hour.

Indy 500 Time Trials and the Doppler Effect

The Indy 500 time trials are the best way to experience the effect, rather than on race day when there is so much crowd noise and the overlapping sounds of all the cars.  During the week before the race, the cars go out on the track, one by one, in time trials to decide the starting order in the pack on race day.  Fans are allowed to wander around the entire complex, so you can get right up to the fence at track level on the straight-away.  The cars go by only thirty feet away, so they are coming almost straight at you as they approach and straight away from you as they leave.  The whine of the car as it approaches is 43% higher than when it is standing still, and it drops to 33% lower than the standing frequency—a ratio almost approaching a factor of two.  And they go past so fast, it is almost a step function, going from a steady high note to a steady low note in less than a second.  That is the Doppler effect!

But as obvious as the acoustic Doppler effect is to us today, it was far from obvious when it was proposed in 1842 by Christian Doppler at a time when trains, the fastest mode of transport at the time, ran at 20 miles per hour or less.  In fact, Doppler’s theory generated so much controversy that the Academy of Sciences of Vienna held a trial in 1853 to decide its merit—and Doppler lost!  For the surprising story of Doppler and the fate of his discovery, see my Physics Today article

From that fraught beginning, the effect has expanded in such importance, that today it is a daily part of our lives.  From Doppler weather radar, to speed traps on the highway, to ultrasound images of babies—Doppler is everywhere.

Development of the Doppler-Fizeau Effect

When Doppler proposed the shift in color of the light from stars in 1842 [1], depending on their motion towards or away from us, he may have been inspired by his walk to work every morning, watching the ripples on the surface of the Vltava River in Prague as the water slipped by the bridge piers.  The drawings in his early papers look reminiscently like the patterns you see with compressed ripples on the upstream side of the pier and stretched out on the downstream side.  Taking this principle to the night sky, Doppler envisioned that binary stars, where one companion was blue and the other was red, was caused by their relative motion.  He could not have known at that time that typical binary star speeds were too small to cause this effect, but his principle was far more general, applying to all wave phenomena. 

Six years later in 1848 [2], the French physicist Armand Hippolyte Fizeau, soon to be famous for making the first direct measurement of the speed of light, proposed the same principle, unaware of Doppler’s publications in German.  As Fizeau was preparing his famous measurement, he originally worked with a spinning mirror (he would ultimately use a toothed wheel instead) and was thinking about what effect the moving mirror might have on the reflected light.  He considered the effect of star motion on starlight, just as Doppler had, but realized that it was more likely that the speed of the star would affect the locations of the spectral lines rather than change the color.  This is in fact the correct argument, because a Doppler shift on the black-body spectrum of a white or yellow star shifts a bit of the infrared into the visible red portion, while shifting a bit of the ultraviolet out of the visible, so that the overall color of the star remains the same, but Fraunhofer lines would shift in the process.  Because of the independent development of the phenomenon by both Doppler and Fizeau, and because Fizeau was a bit clearer in the consequences, the effect is more accurately called the Doppler-Fizeau Effect, and in France sometimes only as the Fizeau Effect.  Here in the US, we tend to forget the contributions of Fizeau, and it is all Doppler.

Fig. 1 The title page of Doppler’s 1842 paper [1] proposing the shift in color of stars caused by their motions. (“On the colored light of double stars and a few other stars in the heavens: Study of an integral part of Bradley’s general aberration theory”)
Fig. 2 Doppler used simple proportionality and relative velocities to deduce the first-order change in frequency of waves caused by motion of the source relative to the receiver, or of the receiver relative to the source.
Fig. 3 Doppler’s drawing of what would later be called the Mach cone generating a shock wave. Mach was one of Doppler’s later champions, making dramatic laboratory demonstrations of the acoustic effect, even as skepticism persisted in accepting the phenomenon.

Doppler and Exoplanet Discovery

It is fitting that many of today’s applications of the Doppler effect are in astronomy. His original idea on binary star colors was wrong, but his idea that relative motion changes frequencies was right, and it has become one of the most powerful astrometric techniques in astronomy today. One of its important recent applications was in the discovery of extrasolar planets orbiting distant stars.

When a large planet like Jupiter orbits a star, the center of mass of the two-body system remains at a constant point, but the individual centers of mass of the planet and the star both orbit the common point. This makes it look like the star has a wobble, first moving towards our viewpoint on Earth, then moving away. Because of this relative motion of the star, the light can appear blueshifted caused by the Doppler effect, then redshifted with a set periodicity. This was observed by Queloz and Mayer in 1995 for the star 51 Pegasi, which represented the first detection of an exoplanet [3]. The duo won the Nobel Prize in 2019 for the discovery.

Fig. 4 A gas giant (like Jupiter) and a star obit a common center of mass causing the star to wobble. The light of the star when viewed at Earth is periodically red- and blue-shifted by the Doppler effect. From Ref.

Doppler and Vera Rubins’ Galaxy Velocity Curves

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Vera Rubin at the Carnegie Institution of Washington used newly developed spectrographs to use the Doppler effect to study the speeds of ionized hydrogen gas surrounding massive stars in individual galaxies [4]. From simple Newtonian dynamics it is well understood that the speed of stars as a function of distance from the galactic center should increase with increasing distance up to the average radius of the galaxy, and then should decrease at larger distances. This trend in speed as a function of radius is called a rotation curve. As Rubin constructed the rotation curves for many galaxies, the increase of speed with increasing radius at small radii emerged as a clear trend, but the stars farther out in the galaxies were all moving far too fast. In fact, they are moving so fast that they exceeded escape velocity and should have flown off into space long ago. This disturbing pattern was repeated consistently in one rotation curve after another for many galaxies.

Fig. 5 Locations of Doppler shifts of ionized hydrogen measured by Vera Rubin on the Andromeda galaxy. From Ref.
Fig. 6 Vera Rubin’s velocity curve for the Andromeda galaxy. From Ref.
Fig. 7 Measured velocity curves relative to what is expected from the visible mass distribution of the galaxy. From Ref.

A simple fix to the problem of the rotation curves is to assume that there is significant mass present in every galaxy that is not observable either as luminous matter or as interstellar dust. In other words, there is unobserved matter, dark matter, in all galaxies that keeps all their stars gravitationally bound. Estimates of the amount of dark matter needed to fix the velocity curves is about five times as much dark matter as observable matter. In short, 80% of the mass of a galaxy is not normal. It is neither a perturbation nor an artifact, but something fundamental and large. The discovery of the rotation curve anomaly by Rubin using the Doppler effect stands as one of the strongest evidence for the existence of dark matter.

There is so much dark matter in the Universe that it must have a major effect on the overall curvature of space-time according to Einstein’s field equations. One of the best probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe is the afterglow of the Big Bang, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Doppler and the Big Bang

The Big Bang was astronomically hot, but as the Universe expanded it cooled. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe cooled sufficiently that the electron-proton plasma that filled space at that time condensed into hydrogen. Plasma is charged and opaque to photons, while hydrogen is neutral and transparent. Therefore, when the hydrogen condensed, the thermal photons suddenly flew free and have continued unimpeded, continuing to cool. Today the thermal glow has reached about three degrees above absolute zero. Photons in thermal equilibrium with this low temperature have an average wavelength of a few millimeters corresponding to microwave frequencies, which is why the afterglow of the Big Bang got its name: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

Not surprisingly, the CMB has no preferred reference frame, because every point in space is expanding relative to every other point in space. In other words, space itself is expanding. Yet soon after the CMB was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson (for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978), an anisotropy was discovered in the background that had a dipole symmetry caused by the Doppler effect as the Solar System moves at 368±2 km/sec relative to the rest frame of the CMB. Our direction is towards galactic longitude 263.85o and latitude 48.25o, or a bit southwest of Virgo. Interestingly, the local group of about 100 galaxies, of which the Milky Way and Andromeda are the largest members, is moving at 627±22 km/sec in the direction of galactic longitude 276o and latitude 30o. Therefore, it seems like we are a bit slack in our speed compared to the rest of the local group. This is in part because we are being pulled towards Andromeda in roughly the opposite direction, but also because of the speed of the solar system in our Galaxy.

Fig. 8 The CMB dipole anisotropy caused by the Doppler effect as the Earth moves at 368 km/sec through the rest frame of the CMB.

Aside from the dipole anisotropy, the CMB is amazingly uniform when viewed from any direction in space, but not perfectly uniform. At the level of 0.005 percent, there are variations in the temperature depending on the location on the sky. These fluctuations in background temperature are called the CMB anisotropy, and they help interpret current models of the Universe. For instance, the average angular size of the fluctuations is related to the overall curvature of the Universe. This is because, in the early Universe, not all parts of it were in communication with each other. This set an original spatial size to thermal discrepancies. As the Universe continued to expand, the size of the regional variations expanded with it, and the sizes observed today would appear larger or smaller, depending on how the universe is curved. Therefore, to measure the energy density of the Universe, and hence to find its curvature, required measurements of the CMB temperature that were accurate to better than a part in 10,000.

Equivalently, parts of the early universe had greater mass density than others, causing the gravitational infall of matter towards these regions. Then, through the Doppler effect, light emitted (or scattered) by matter moving towards these regions contributes to the anisotropy. They contribute what are known as “Doppler peaks” in the spatial frequency spectrum of the CMB anisotropy.

Fig. 9 The CMB small-scale anisotropy, part of which is contributed by Doppler shifts of matter falling into denser regions in the early universe.

The examples discussed in this blog (exoplanet discovery, galaxy rotation curves, and cosmic background) are just a small sampling of the many ways that the Doppler effect is used in Astronomy. But clearly, Doppler has played a key role in the long history of the universe.

By David D. Nolte, Jan. 23, 2022


References:

[1] C. A. DOPPLER, “Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einiger anderer Gestirne des Himmels (About the coloured light of the binary stars and some other stars of the heavens),” Proceedings of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, vol. V, no. 2, pp. 465–482, (Reissued 1903) (1842)

[2] H. Fizeau, “Acoustique et optique,” presented at the Société Philomathique de Paris, Paris, 1848.

[3] M. Mayor and D. Queloz, “A JUPITER-MASS COMPANION TO A SOLAR-TYPE STAR,” Nature, vol. 378, no. 6555, pp. 355-359, Nov (1995)

[4] Rubin, Vera; Ford, Jr., W. Kent (1970). “Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula from a Spectroscopic Survey of Emission Regions”. The Astrophysical Journal. 159: 379


Further Reading

D. D. Nolte, “The Fall and Rise of the Doppler Effect,” Physics Today, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 31-35, Mar (2020)

M. Tegmark, “Doppler peaks and all that: CMB anisotropies and what they can tell us,” in International School of Physics Enrico Fermi Course 132 on Dark Matter in the Universe, Varenna, Italy, Jul 25-Aug 04 1995, vol. 132, in Proceedings of the International School of Physics Enrico Fermi, 1996, pp. 379-416

Physics and the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance

When I arrived at Berkeley in 1981 to start graduate school in physics, the single action I took that secured my future as a physicist, more than spending scores of sleepless nights studying quantum mechanics by Schiff or electromagnetism by Jackson —was buying a motorcycle!  Why motorcycle maintenance should be the Tao of Physics was beyond me at the time—but Zen is transcendent.

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The Quantum Sadistics

In my first semester of grad school I made two close friends, Keith Swenson and Kent Owen, as we stayed up all night working on impossible problem sets and hand-grading a thousand midterms for an introductory physics class that we were TAs for.  The camaraderie was made tighter when Keith and Kent bought motorcycles and I quickly followed suit, buying my first wheels –– a 1972 Suzuki GT550.    It was an old bike, but in good shape and ready to ride, so the three of us began touring around the San Francisco Bay Area together on weekend rides.  We went out to Mt. Tam, or up to Vallejo, or around the North and South Bay.  Kent thought this was a very cool way for physics grads to spend their time and he came up with a name for our gang –– the “Quantum Sadistics”!  He even made a logo for our “colors” that was an eye shedding a tear drop shaped like the dagger of a quantum raising operator.

At the end of the first year, Keith left the program, not sure he was the right material for a physics degree, and moved to San Diego to head up the software arm of a start-up company that he had founder’s shares in.  Kent and I continued at Berkeley, but soon got too busy to keep up the weekend rides.  My Suzuki was my only set of wheels, so I tooled around with it, keeping it running when it really didn’t want to go any further.  I had to pull its head and dive deep into it to adjust the rockers.  It stayed together enough for a trip all the way down Highway 1 to San Diego to visit Keith and back, and a trip all the way up Highway 1 to Seattle to visit my grandparents and back, having ridden the full length of the Pacific Coast from Tijuana to Vancouver.  Motorcycle maintenance was always part of the process.

Andrew Lange

After a few semesters as a TA for the large lecture courses in physics, it was time to try something real and I noticed a job opening posted on a bulletin board.  It was for a temporary research position in Prof. Paul Richard’s group.  I had TA-ed for him once, but knew nothing of his research, and the interview wasn’t even with him, but with a graduate student named Andrew Lange.  I met with Andrew in a ground-floor lab on the south side of Birge Hall.  He was soft-spoken and congenial, with round architect glasses, fine sandy hair and had about him a hint of something exotic.  He was encouraging in his reactions to my answers.  Then he asked if I had a motorcycle.  I wasn’t sure if he already knew, or whether it was a test of some kind, so I said that I did.  “Do you work on it?”, he asked.  I remember my response.  “Not really,” I said.  In my mind I was no mechanic.  Adjusting the overhead rockers was nothing too difficult.  It wasn’t like I had pulled the pistons.

“It’s important to work on your motorcycle.”

For some reason, he didn’t seem to like my answer.  He probed further.  “Do you change the tires or the oil?”.  I admitted that I did, and on further questioning, he slowly dragged out my story of pulling the head and adjusting the cams.  He seemed to relax, like he had gotten to the bottom of something.  He then gave me some advice, focusing on me with a strange intensity and stressing very carefully, “It’s important to work on your motorcycle.”

I got the job and joined Paul Richards research group.  It was a heady time.  Andrew was designing a rocket-borne far-infrared spectrometer that would launch on a sounding rocket from Nagoya, Japan.  The spectrometer was to make the most detailed measurements ever of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation during a five-minute free fall at the edge of space, before plunging into the Pacific Ocean.  But the spectrometer was missing a set of key optical elements known as far-infrared dichroic beam splitters.  Without these beam splitters, the spectrometer was just a small chunk of machined aluminum.  It became my job to create these beam splitters.  The problem was that no one knew how to do it.  So with Andrew’s help, I scanned the literature, and we settled on a design related to results from the Ulrich group in Germany.

Our spectral range was different than previous cases, so I created a new methodology using small mylar sheets, patterned with photolithography, evaporating thin films of aluminum on both sides of the mylar.  My first photomasks were made using an amazingly archaic technology known as rubylith that had been used in the 70’s to fabricate low-level integrated circuits.  Andrew showed me how to cut the fine strips of red plastic tape at a large scale that was then photo-reduced for contract printing.  I modeled the beam splitters with equivalent circuits to predict the bandpass spectra, and learned about Kramers-Kronig transforms to explain an additional phase shift that appeared in the interferometric tests of the devices.  These were among the first metamaterials ever created (although this was before that word existed), with an engineered magnetic response for millimeter waves.  I fabricated the devices in the silicon fab on the top floor of the electrical engineering building on the Berkeley campus.  It was one of the first university-based VLSI fabs in the country, with high-class clean rooms and us in bunny suits.  But I was doing everything but silicon, modifying all their carefully controlled processes in the photolithography bay.  I made and characterized a full set of 5 of these high-tech beam splitters–right before I was ejected from the lab and banned.  My processes were incompatible with the VLSI activities of the rest of the students.  Fortunately, I had completed the devices, with a little extra material to spare.

I rode my motorcycle with Andrew and his friends around the Bay Area and up to Napa and the wine country.  One memorable weekend Paul had all his grad students come up to his property in Mendocino County to log trees.  Of course, we rode up on our bikes.  Paul’s land was high on a coastal mountain next to the small winery owned by Charles Kittel (the famous Kittel of “Solid State Physics”).  The weekend was rustic.  The long-abandoned hippie-shack on the property was uninhabitable so we roughed it.  After two days of hauling and stacking logs, I took a long way home riding along dark roads under tall redwoods.

Andrew moved his operation to the University of Nagoya, Japan, six months before the launch date.  The spectrometer checked out perfectly.  As launch day approached, it was mounted into the nose cone of the sounding rocket, continuing to pass all calibration tests.  On the day of launch, we held our breath back in Berkeley.  There was a 12 hour time difference, then we received the report.  The launch was textbook perfect, but at the critical moment when the explosive nose-cone bolts were supposed to blow, they failed.  The cone stayed firmly in place, and the spectrometer telemetered back perfect measurements of the inside of the rocket all the way down until it crashed into the Pacific, and the last 9 months of my life sank into the depths of the Marianas Trench.  I read the writing on the thin aluminum wall, and the following week I was interviewing for a new job up at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the DOE national lab high on the hill overlooking the Berkeley campus.

Eugene Haller

The  instrument I used in Paul Richard’s lab to characterize my state-of-the-art dichroic beamsplitters was a far-infrared Fourier-transform spectrometer that Paul had built using a section of 1-foot-diameter glass sewer pipe.  Bob McMurray, a graduate student working with Prof. Eugene Haller on the hill, was a routine user of this makeshift spectrometer, and I had been looking over Bob’s shoulder at the interesting data he was taking on shallow defect centers in semiconductors.   The work sounded fascinating, and as Andrew’s Japanese sounding rocket settled deeper into the ocean floor, I arranged to meet with Eugene Haller in his office at LBL.

I was always clueless about interviews.  I never thought about them ahead of time, and never knew what I needed to say.  On the other hand, I always had a clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish.  I think this gave me a certain solid confidence that may have come through.  So I had no idea what Eugene was getting at as we began the discussion.  He asked me some questions about my project with Paul, which I am sure I answered with lots of details about Kramers-Kronig and the like.  Then came the question strangely reminiscent of when I first met Andrew Lange:  Did I work on my car?  Actually, I didn’t have a car, I had a motorcycle, and said so.  Well then, did I work on my motorcycle?  He had that same strange intensity that Andrew had when he asked me roughly the same question.  He looked like a prosecuting attorney waiting for the suspect to incriminate himself.  Once again, I described pulling the head and adjusting the rockers and cams.

Eugene leaned back in his chair and relaxed.  He began talking in the future tense about the project I would be working on.  It was a new project for the new Center for Advanced Materials at LBL, for which he was the new director.  The science revolved around semiconductors and especially a promising new material known as GaAs.  He never actually said I had the job … all of a sudden it just seemed to be assumed.  When the interview was over, he simply asked me to give him an answer in a few days if I would come up and join his group.

I didn’t know it at the time, by Eugene had a beautiful vintage Talbot roadster that was his baby.  One of his loves was working on his car.  He was a real motor head and knew everything about the mechanics.  He was also an avid short-wave radio enthusiast and knew as much about vacuum tubes as he did about transistors.  Working on cars (or motorcycles) was a guaranteed ticket into his group.  At a recent gathering of his former students and colleagues for his memorial, similar stories circulated about that question:  Did you work on your car?  The answer to this one question mattered more than any answer you gave about physics.

I joined Eugene Haller’s research group at LBL in March of 1984 and received my PhD on topics of semiconductor physics in 1988.  My association with his group opened the door to a post-doc position at AT&T Bell Labs and then to a faculty position at Purdue University where I currently work on the physics of oncology in medicine and have launched two biotech companies—all triggered by the simple purchase of a motorcycle.

Andrew Lange’s career was particularly stellar.  He joined the faculty of Cal Tech, and I was amazed to read in Science magazine in 2004 or 2005, in a section called “Nobel Watch”, that he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for his work on BoomerAng that had launched and monitored a high-altitude balloon as it circled the South Pole taking unprecedented data on the CMB that constrained the amount of dark matter in the universe.  Around that same time I invited Paul Richards to Purdue to give our weekly physics colloquium to talk about his own work on MAXIMA. There was definitely a buzz going around that the BoomerAng and MAXIMA collaborations were being talked about in Nobel circles. The next year, the Nobel Prize of 2006 was indeed awarded for work on the Cosmic Microwave Background, but to Mather and Smoot for their earlier work on the COBE satellite.

Then, in January 2010, I was shocked to read in the New York Times that Andrew, that vibrant sharp-eyed brilliant physicist, was found lifeless in a hotel room, dead from asphyxiation.  The police ruled it a suicide.  Apparently few had known of his life-long struggle with depression, and it had finally overwhelmed him.  Perhaps he had sold his motorcycle by then.  But I wonder—if he had pulled out his wrenches and gotten to work on its engine, whether he might have been enveloped by the zen of motorcycle maintenance and the crisis would have passed him by.  As Andrew had told me so many years ago, and I wish I could have reminded him, “It’s important to work on your motorcycle.”

Dark Matter Mysteries

There is more to the Universe than meets the eye—way more. Over the past quarter century, it has become clear that all the points of light in the night sky, the stars, the Milky Way, the nubulae, all the distant galaxies, when added up with the nonluminous dust, constitute only a small fraction of the total energy density of the Universe. In fact, “normal” matter, like the stuff of which we are made—star dust—contributes only 4% to everything that is. The rest is something else, something different, something that doesn’t show up in the most sophisticated laboratory experiments, not even the Large Hadron Collider [1]. It is unmeasurable on terrestrial scales, and even at the scale of our furthest probe—the Voyager I spacecraft that left our solar system several years ago—there have been no indications of deviations from Newton’s law of gravity. To the highest precision we can achieve, it is invisible and non-interacting on any scale smaller than our stellar neighborhood. Perhaps it can never be detected in any direct sense. If so, then how do we know it is there? The answer comes from galactic trajectories. The motions in and of galaxies have been, and continue to be, the principal laboratory for the investigation of  cosmic questions about the dark matter of the universe.

Today, the nature of Dark Matter is one of the greatest mysteries in physics, and the search for direct detection of Dark Matter is one of physics’ greatest pursuits.

Island Universes

The nature of the Milky Way was a mystery through most of human history. To the ancient Greeks it was the milky circle (γαλαξίας κύκλος , pronounced galaktikos kyklos) and to the Romans it was literally the milky way (via lactea). Aristotle, in his Meteorologica, briefly suggested that the Milky Way might be composed of a large number of distant stars, but then rejected that idea in favor of a wisp, exhaled like breath on a cold morning, from the stars. The Milky Way is unmistakable on a clear dark night to anyone who looks up, far away from city lights. It was a constant companion through most of human history, like the constant stars, until electric lights extinguished it from much of the world in the past hundred years. Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Hous of Fame (1380) proclaimed “See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë Which men clepeth the Milky Wey, For hit is whyt.” (See yonder, lo, the galaxy which men call the Milky Way, for it is white.).

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Hubble image of one of the galaxies in the Coma Cluster of galaxies that Fritz Zwicky used to announce that the universe contained a vast amount of dark matter.

Aristotle was fated, again, to be corrected by Galileo. Using his telescope in 1610, Galileo was the first to resolve a vast field of individual faint stars in the Milky Way. This led Emmanual Kant, in 1755, to propose that the Milky Way Galaxy was a rotating disk of stars held together by Newtonian gravity like the disk of the solar system, but much larger. He went on to suggest that the faint nebulae might be other far distant galaxies, which he called “island universes”. The first direct evidence that nebulae were distant galaxies came in 1917 with the observation of a supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy by Heber Curtis. Based on the brightness of the supernova, he estimated that the Andromeda Galaxy was over a million light years away, but uncertainty in the distance measurement kept the door open for the possibility that it was still part of the Milky Way, and hence the possibility that the Milky Way was the Universe.

The question of the nature of the nebulae hinged on the problem of measuring distances across vast amounts of space. By line of sight, there is no yard stick to tell how far away something is, so other methods must be used. Stellar parallax, for instance, can gauge the distance to nearby stars by measuring slight changes in the apparent positions of the stars as the Earth changes its position around the Sun through the year. This effect was used successfully for the first time in 1838 by Fredrich Bessel, and by the year 2000 more than a hundred thousand stars had their distances measured using stellar parallax. Recent advances in satellite observatories have extended the reach of stellar parallax to a distance of about 10,000 light years from the Sun, but this is still only a tenth of the diameter of the Milky Way. To measure distances to the far side of our own galaxy, or beyond, requires something else.

Because of Henrietta Leavitt

In 1908 Henrietta Leavitt, working at the Harvard Observatory as one of the famous female “computers”, discovered that stars whose luminosities oscillate with a steady periodicity, stars known as Cepheid variables, have a relationship between the period of oscillation and the average luminosity of the star [2]. By measuring the distance to nearby Cepheid variables using stellar parallax, the absolute brightness of the Cepheid could be calibrated, and the Cepheid could then be used as “standard candles”. This meant that by observing the period of oscillation and the brightness of a distant Cepheid, the distance to the star could be calculated. Edwin Hubble (1889 – 1953), working at the Mount Wilson observatory in Passedena CA, observed Cepheid variables in several of the brightest nebulae in the night sky. In 1925 he announced his observation of individual Cepheid variables in Andromeda and calculated that Andromeda was more than a million light years away, more than 10 Milky Way diameters (the actual number is about 25 Milky Way diameters). This meant that Andromeda was a separate galaxy and that the Universe was made of more than just our local cluster of stars. Once this door was opened, the known Universe expanded quickly up to a hundred Milky Way diameters as Hubble measured the distances to scores of our neighboring galaxies in the Virgo galaxy cluster. However, it was more than just our knowledge of the universe that was expanding.

Armed with measurements of galactic distances, Hubble was in a unique position to relate those distances to the speeds of the galaxies by combining his distance measurements with spectroscopic observations of the light spectra made by other astronomers. These galaxy emission spectra could be used to measure the Doppler effect on the light emitted by the stars of the galaxy. The Doppler effect, first proposed by Christian Doppler (1803 – 1853) in 1843, causes the wavelength of emitted light to be shifted to the red for objects receding from an observer, and shifted to the blue for objects approaching an observer. The amount of spectral shift is directly proportional the the object’s speed. Doppler’s original proposal was to use this effect to measure the speed of binary stars, which is indeed performed routinely today by astronomers for just this purpose, but in Doppler’s day spectroscopy was not precise enough to accomplish this. However, by the time Hubble was making his measurements, optical spectroscopy had become a precision science, and the Doppler shift of the galaxies could be measured with great accuracy. In 1929 Hubble announced the discovery of a proportional relationship between the distance to the galaxies and their Doppler shift. What he found was that the galaxies [3] are receding from us with speeds proportional to their distance [4]. Hubble himself made no claims at that time about what these data meant from a cosmological point of view, but others quickly noted that this Hubble effect could be explained if the universe were expanding.

Einstein’s Mistake

The state of the universe had been in doubt ever since Heber Curtis observed the supernova in the Andromeda galaxy in 1917. Einstein published a paper that same year in which he sought to resolve a problem that had appeared in the solution to his field equations. It appeared that the universe should either be expanding or contracting. Because the night sky literally was the firmament, it went against the mentality of the times to think of the universe as something intrinsically unstable, so Einstein fixed it with an extra term in his field equations, adding something called the cosmological constant, denoted by the Greek lambda (Λ). This extra term put the universe into a static equilibrium, and Einstein could rest easy with his firm trust in the firmament. However, a few years later, in 1922, the Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann (1888 – 1925) published a paper that showed that Einstein’s static equilibrium was actually unstable, meaning that small perturbations away from the current energy density would either grow or shrink. This same result was found independently by the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître in 1927, who suggested that not only was the universe  expanding, but that it had originated in a singular event (now known as the Big Bang). Einstein was dismissive of Lemaître’s proposal and even quipped “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious.” [5] But after Hubble published his observation on the red shifts of galaxies in 1929, Lemaître pointed out that the redshifts would be explained by an expanding universe. Although Hubble himself never fully adopted this point of view, Einstein immediately saw it for what it was—a clear and simple explanation for a basic physical phenomenon that he had foolishly overlooked. Einstein retracted his cosmological constant in embarrassment and gave his support to Lemaître’s expanding universe. Nonetheless, Einstein’s physical intuition was never too far from the mark, and the cosmological constant has been resurrected in recent years in the form of Dark Energy. However, something else, both remarkable and disturbing, reared its head in the intervening years—Dark Matter.

Fritz Zwicky: Gadfly Genius

It is difficult to write about important advances in astronomy and astrophysics of the 20th century without tripping over Fritz Zwicky. As the gadfly genius that he was, he had a tendency to shoot close to the mark, or at least some of his many crazy ideas tended to be right. He was also in the right place at the right time, at the Mt. Wilson observatory nearby Cal Tech with regular access the World’s largest telescope. Shortly after Hubble proved that the nebulae were other galaxies and used Doppler shifts to measure their speeds, Zwicky (with his assistant Baade) began a study of as many galactic speeds and distances as they could. He was able to construct a three-dimensional map of the galaxies in the relatively nearby Coma galaxy cluster, together with their velocities. He then deduced that the galaxies in this isolated cluster were gravitational bound to each other, performing a whirling dance in each others thrall, like stars in globular star clusters in our Milky Way. But there was a serious problem.

Star clusters display average speeds and average gravitational potentials that are nicely balanced, a result predicted from a theorem of mechanics that was named the Virial Theorem by Rudolf Clausius in 1870. The Virial Theorem states that the average kinetic energy of a system of many bodies is directly related to the average potential energy of the system. By applying the Virial Theorem to the galaxies of the Coma cluster, Zwicky found that the dynamics of the galaxies were badly out of balance. The galaxy kinetic energies were far too fast relative to the gravitational potential—so fast, in fact, that the galaxies should have flown off away from each other and not been bound at all. To reconcile this discrepancy of the galactic speeds with the obvious fact that the galaxies were gravitationally bound, Zwicky postulated that there was unobserved matter present in the cluster that supplied the missing gravitational potential. The amount of missing potential was very large, and Zwicky’s calculations predicted that there was 400 times as much invisible matter, which he called “dark matter”, as visible. With his usual flare for the dramatic, Zwicky announced his findings to the World in 1933, but the World shrugged— after all, it was just Zwicky.

Nonetheless, Zwicky’s and Baade’s observations of the structure of the Coma cluster, and the calculations using the Virial Theorem, were verified by other astronomers. Something was clearly happening in the Coma cluster, but other scientists and astronomers did not have the courage or vision to make the bold assessment that Zwicky had. The problem of the Coma cluster, and a growing number of additional galaxy clusters that have been studied during the succeeding years, was to remain a thorn in the side of gravitational theory through half a century, and indeed remains a thorn to the present day. It is an important clue to a big question about the nature of gravity, which is arguably the least understood of the four forces of nature.

Vera Rubin: Galaxy Rotation Curves

Galactic clusters are among the largest coherent structures in the observable universe, and there are many questions about their origin and dynamics. Smaller gravitationally bound structures that can be handled more easily are individual galaxies themselves. If something important was missing in the dynamics of galactic clusters, perhaps the dynamics of the stars in individual galaxies could help shed light on the problem. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Vera Rubin at the Carnegie Institution of Washington used newly developed spectrographs to study the speeds of stars in individual galaxies. From simple Newtonian dynamics it is well understood that the speed of stars as a function of distance from the galactic center should increase with increasing distance up to the average radius of the galaxy, and then should decrease at larger distances. This trend in speed as a function of radius is called a rotation curve. As Rubin constructed the rotation curves for many galaxies, the increase of speed with increasing radius at small radii emerged as a clear trend, but the stars farther out in the galaxies were all moving far too fast. In fact, they are moving so fast that they exceeded escape velocity and should have flown off into space long ago. This disturbing pattern was repeated consistently in one rotation curve after another.

A simple fix to the problem of the rotation curves is to assume that there is significant mass present in every galaxy that is not observable either as luminous matter or as interstellar dust. In other words, there is unobserved matter, dark matter, in all galaxies that keeps all their stars gravitationally bound. Estimates of the amount of dark matter needed to fix the velocity curves is about five times as much dark matter as observable matter. This is not the same factor of 400 that Zwicky had estimated for the Coma cluster, but it is still a surprisingly large number. In short, 80% of the mass of a galaxy is not normal. It is neither a perturbation nor an artifact, but something fundamental and large. In fact, there is so much dark matter in the Universe that it must have a major effect on the overall curvature of space-time according to Einstein’s field equations. One of the best probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe is the afterglow of the Big Bang, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

The Big Bang

The Big Bang was incredibly hot, but as the Universe expanded, its temperature cooled. About 379,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe cooled sufficiently that the electron-nucleon plasma that filled space at that time condensed primarily into hydrogen. Plasma is charged and hence is opaque to photons.  Hydrogen, on the other hand, is neutral and transparent. Therefore, when the hydrogen condensed, the thermal photons suddenly flew free, unimpeded, and have continued unimpeded, continuing to cool, until today the thermal glow has reached about three degrees above absolute zero. Photons in thermal equilibrium with this low temperature have an average wavelength of a few millimeters corresponding to microwave frequencies, which is why the afterglow of the Big Bang got its CMB name.

The CMB is amazingly uniform when viewed from any direction in space, but it is not perfectly uniform. At the level of 0.005 percent, there are variations in the temperature depending on the location on the sky. These fluctuations in background temperature are called the CMB anisotropy, and they play an important role helping to interpret current models of the Universe. For instance, the average angular size of the fluctuations is related to the overall curvature of the Universe. This is because in the early Universe not all parts of it were in communication with each other because of the finite size and the finite speed of light. This set an original spatial size to thermal discrepancies. As the Universe continued to expand, the size of the regional variations expanded with it, and the sizes observed today would appear larger or smaller, depending on how the universe is curved. Therefore, to measure the energy density of the Universe, and hence to find its curvature, required measurements of the CMB temperature that were accurate to better than a part in 10,000.

Andrew Lange and Paul Richards: The Lambda and the Omega

In graduate school at Berkeley in 1982, my first graduate research assistantship was in the group of Paul Richards, one of the world leaders in observational cosmology. One of his senior graduate students at the time, Andrew Lange, was sharp and charismatic and leading an ambitious project to measure the cosmic background radiation on an experiment borne by a Japanese sounding rocket. My job was to create a set of far-infrared dichroic beamsplitters for the spectrometer.   A few days before launch, a technician noticed that the explosive bolts on the rocket nose-cone had expired. When fired, these would open the cone and expose the instrument at high altitude to the CMB. The old bolts were duly replaced with fresh ones. On launch day, the instrument and the sounding rocket worked perfectly, but the explosive bolts failed to fire, and the spectrometer made excellent measurements of the inside of the nose cone all the way up and all the way down until it sank into the Pacific Ocean. I left Paul’s comology group for a more promising career in solid state physics under the direction of Eugene Haller and Leo Falicov, but Paul and Andrew went on to great fame with high-altitude balloon-borne experiments that flew at 40,000 feet, above most of the atmosphere, to measure the CMB anisotropy.

By the late nineties, Andrew was established as a professor at Cal Tech. He was co-leading an experiment called BOOMerANG that flew a high-altitude balloon around Antarctica, while Paul was leading an experiment called MAXIMA that flew a balloon from Palastine, Texas. The two experiments had originally been coordinated together, but operational differences turned the former professor/student team into competitors to see who would be the first to measure the shape of the Universe through the CMB anisotropy.  BOOMerANG flew in 1997 and again in 1998, followed by MAXIMA that flew in 1998 and again in 1999. In early 2000, Andrew and the BOOMerANG team announced that the Universe was flat, confirmed quickly by an announcement by MAXIMA [BoomerMax]. This means that the energy density of the Universe is exactly critical, and there is precisely enough gravity to balance the expansion of the Universe. This parameter is known as Omega (Ω).  What was perhaps more important than this discovery was the announcement by Paul’s MAXIMA team that the amount of “normal” baryonic matter in the Universe made up only about 4% of the critical density. This is a shockingly small number, but agreed with predictions from Big Bang nucleosynthesis. When combined with independent measurements of Dark Energy known as Lambda (Λ), it also meant that about 25% of the energy density of the Universe is made up of Dark Matter—about five times more than ordinary matter. Zwicky’s Dark Matter announcement of 1933, virtually ignored by everyone, had been 75 years ahead of its time [6].

Dark Matter Pursuits

Today, the nature of Dark Matter is one of the greatest mysteries in physics, and the search for direct detection of Dark Matter is one of physics’ greatest pursuits. The indirect evidence for Dark Matter is incontestable—the CMB anisotropy, matter filaments in the early Universe, the speeds of galaxies in bound clusters, rotation curves of stars in Galaxies, gravitational lensing—all of these agree and confirm that most of the gravitational mass of the Universe is Dark. But what is it? The leading idea today is that it consists of weakly interacting particles, called cold dark matter (CDM). The dark matter particles pass right through you without ever disturbing a single electron. This is unlike unseen cosmic rays that are also passing through your body at the rate of several per second, leaving ionized trails like bullet holes through your flesh. Dark matter passes undisturbed through the entire Earth. This is not entirely unbelievable, because neutrinos, which are part of “normal” matter, also mostly pass through the Earth without interaction. Admittedly, the physics of neutrinos is not completely understood, but if ordinary matter can interact so weakly, then dark matter is just more extreme and perhaps not so strange. Of course, this makes detection of dark matter a big challenge. If a particle exists that won’t interact with anything, then how would you ever measure it? There are a lot of clever physicists with good ideas how to do it, but none of the ideas are easy, and none have worked yet.

[1] As of the writing of this chapter, Dark Matter has not been observed in particle form, but only through gravitational effects at large (galactic) scales.

[2] Leavitt, Henrietta S. “1777 Variables in the Magellanic Clouds”. Annals of Harvard College Observatory. LX(IV) (1908) 87-110

[3] Excluding the local group of galaxies that include Andromeda and Triangulum that are gravitationally influenced by the Milky Way.

[4] Hubble, Edwin (1929). “A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae”. PNAS 15 (3): 168–173.

[5] Deprit, A. (1984). “Monsignor Georges Lemaître”. In A. Barger (ed). The Big Bang and Georges Lemaître. Reidel. p. 370.

[6] I was amazed to read in Science magazine in 2004 or 2005, in a section called “Nobel Watch”, that Andrew Lange was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for his work on BoomerAng.  Around that same time I invited Paul Richards to Purdue to give our weekly physics colloquium.  There was definitely a buzz going around that the BoomerAng and MAXIMA collaborations were being talked about in Nobel circles.  The next year, the Nobel Prize of 2006 was indeed awarded for work on the Cosmic Microwave Background, but to Mather and Smoot for their earlier work on the COBE satellite.