Vera Rubin, who did pioneering work on dark matter, dies

Vera Rubin, a pioneering astronomer who helped find powerful evidence of dark matter, has died, her son said Monday.

She was 88.

Allan Rubin, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, said his mother died Sunday night of natural causes. He said the Philadelphia native had been living in the Princeton area.

Vera Rubin found that galaxies don't quite rotate the way they were predicted, and that lent support to the theory that some other force was at work, namely dark matter.