In the 1970s, the astronomer Vera Rubin made observations of distant galaxies that she interpreted as indicating that perhaps 90% of the mass in a galaxy is invisible to us (“dark matter”). She measured the speed with which stars orbit the center of a galaxy, as a function of the distance of the stars from the center. The orbital speed was determined by measuring the “Doppler shift” of the light from the stars, an effect that makes light shift toward the red end of the spectrum (“red shift”) if the star has a velocity component away from us, and makes light shift toward the blue end of the spectrum if the star has a velocity component toward us. She found that for stars farther out from the center of the galaxy, the orbital speed of the star hardly changes with distance from the center of the galaxy, as is indicated in the figure. The visible components of the galaxy (stars and illuminated clouds of dust) are most dense at the center of the galaxy and thin out rapidly as you move away from the center, so most of the visible mass is near the center.