Sparke elected APS fellow

Astronomy professor Linda Sparke has been elected to the fellowship program at the American Physical Society, a worldwide federation of more than 42,000 physicists. She is one of 192 APS members this year to receive the honor, which recognizes those members who have made significant advances in knowledge through original research and publications or innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. Sparke, who joined the faculty in 1989 and is chair of the astronomy department, studies the motions of gas and stars as they orbit within galaxies. Examining this motion, she says, enables her to infer the galaxies’ distribution of “dark matter,” an invisible substance that scientists think makes up most of the mass of the galaxies.