Author: countessk8

tumblr's prolly gonna delete half my shit so this is a backup b/c i can't even get the download to work (guess 2 gb is too much for my miserable connection to handle without shitting out like 5 network errors)

shadowedhills:

Someone on Twitter pointed out that the worst part of the year of deaths is not simply that we’ve lost celebrities, but that we’ve lost a whole group of the celebrities who helped an entire generation realize that being different was somehow okay. That your sexuality and sexual identity/presentation didn’t have to be set in stone, or conform to the conservative standards. That you could have a mental illness and still be happy and successful and loved. The people we lost this year helped so many people come to terms with who they were, and losing them hurts precisely because they were so comforting in those ways.

This year has become a parody of itself. I cannot wait to toast its end on Saturday.

the-future-now:

Vera Rubin, the woman who discovered the first evidence of dark matter, has died at 88

  • Vera Rubin, the astrophysicist responsible for confirming the first existence of dark matter, died on Sunday night at the age of 88.
  • Carnegie Institution president Matthew Scott called Rubin “a national treasure as an accomplished astronomer and a wonderful role model for young scientist.”
  • Rubin and her colleagues observed galaxies in the 1970s, they learned the motion of stars is a result of a “material that does not emit light and extends beyond the optical galaxy” — also known as dark matter.
  • Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky proposed the idea of dark matter in 1933, but Rubin’s groundbreaking work subsequently led to the confirmation of the material.
  • This finding is what led to the discovery that 90% of the universe is made up of dark matter, a finding some colleagues felt was overlooked and deserving of a Nobel Prize. Read more

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