William Kent Ford Jr. (April 8, 1931 – June 18, 2023) was an American astronomer involved with the theory of dark matter.
He worked with scientist Vera Rubin, who used his advanced spectrometer in her studies of space and matter.
This spectrometer allowed the pair to drastically change the way dark matter was viewed, by analyzing the various spectrums of light galaxies give off in different parts of their spirals.
He received the 1985 James Craig Watson Medal for his work on image enhancement and galactic dynamics.
In an important paper co-authored with astronomer Vera Rubin in 1970,[6] and a follow-up paper in 1980,[7] Rubin and Ford established that the orbits of stars around the center of galaxies (the "galaxy rotation curve") does not decrease with distance from the galactic center, as expected from Kepler's rotation law, but remains constant (or "flat") with distance.