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Hubble Spots Long-Sought Intergalactic Gas
hubie writes: "NASA is announcing that Hubble has indirectly detected the long-expected existence of intergalactic hydrogen gas. This is important because it confirms some of the Big Bang models that predict how much hydrogen should have been created. Hubble used a quasar as a light source for spectroscopic measurements. "
NASA could have saved a lot of time and trouble looking for intergalactic gasses if they had checked the septic system near the local A&W...
The Second Amendment Sisters
Finding God in a Dog
-Hey! That page loaded up almost instantly.. No flashy graphics or nothing.. Where is all that tax money going?
air and light and time and space
Cool. That means we're not stuck in this dinky galaxy anymore... we can take our Bussards to Andromeda and exploit the native populations there, too.
I can see the fnords!
...that I can point out to religious zealots when they come up with another fable about how some guy with a funky beard created everything!
--
#nohup cat
man did that stink.
----------------
Programming, is like sex.
The press releases is available in HTML format (and with an active link to additional information on the Hubble website) here. As usual, Spaceref.com had this posted yesterday, Slashdot is tad slow on the uptake where space science and exploration is concerned.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Looks like we'll have to break out the intergalactic beano.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
Wow, this is cool. This answers half the question about where the missing mass in the universe is.
Once this number is refined, we can calculate how much mass has been consumed by black holes because we think we know how much the universe weighs.
Once we understand how much mass black holes have consumed of our universe, we can plot the expected frequency of different classes of black holes.
Once we have THAT number, we can start figuring out how many black holes should be where, and we can use observed results to produce more evidence for and against theories such as quantum black holes.
This discovery could eventually refine our view of the entire universe! Hot damn!
Slashdot screwed up the links for me somehow (or I screwed up). The press release is here.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I once read a creationist article that used the fact that there wasn't enough Hydrogen around for the Universe to be that old as an argument against Big Bang and Evolution. heh.
This is certainly a long-standing and very interesting question to have addressed (and a kool way to celebrate a ten-year anniversary).
FYI, more information/photos/etc can be found at the space telescope website here
I find that its very very sad that so far no one has had anything revelant or even somewhat intresting to say...
Yes I realize this post is just as bad as the rest of yours...
Jainith
kiss my ass "I love you"
It must be those inkblot cards they use in the crazy house. Since the first thing that comes to your mind is a dick...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
are you using lynx? that would sure explain the lack of graphics :)
From the article:
"Previous observations show that billions of years ago this
missing matter formed vast complexes of hydrogen clouds -- but
since then has vanished. Even Hubble's keen eye didn't see the
hydrogen directly because it is too hot and rarified."
If much of the gas was in plasma form, it should be interesting to see if Chandra can fill in a few more details.
He did it on the Monday after the first Sunday, which explains why he had to ask Adam what he and Eve were up to. He was off by M31 at the time.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
Seriously, you'll never convince a certain set of folks that the universe wasn't created, no matter what the evidence. Let 'em believe what they want, as long as they stay the hell out of schools.
Lets suppose you're standing somewhere in outer space, and, for the sake of the story, we dont have to worry about the little details like food, and water, and oxygen to breathe, and all that.
You're standing somewhere in outer space, and in your hand, you're holding a gigantic steel pole, one light-day long. That is, in order to see the entire pole, you have to wait an entire day for the light from the opposite end of the pole to reach your eyes.
You point it away from you, and wait a day. 24 hours later, you see the entire length of the pole in a straight line..from where it begins in your hand, to the other end, billions of miles away.
You now turn in a complete circle in one spot.
From your point of view, what would the pole look like now? The light from the other end of the poll still has a day left go before it reaches your eyes! From someone else's point of view, what would it look like? And why would it look different to an outside observer?
I'll give a free gift to the first person who gives me a decent explanation to this puzzle. I've asked it of 3 different Astronomy teachers, and all three gave me different answers.
Lets hear some ideas!
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
If large ammounts of not only interstellar but intergalactic hydrogen exist out there, it may eliminate the need for "dark matter" in explaining the continued expansion of the universe.
Since we've never been able to prove the existence of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) this does seem to be a more plausable explanation based on our current understanding of physics. However, we need much more information about the ammount of intergalactic hydrogen, it's distribution, and it's density before we can make that judgement.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Now.. if we could just disprove the constant speed of light, alot more problems would just disappear.
Spam the witch ---> sarah_ellis_19@hotmail.com
Seldom-sought gas found in bathroom an hour after my dad ate a spicy meal. Scientists are now designing the first methane powered fan and are close to solving the mystery of the missing meatloaf. Standard olfactory tests do suggest the meatloaf was consumed by father, but until further tests are performed it is still speculation.
Just think, all we need to do now is come up with how to make a bussard ramjet and we have all the fuel we need to accelerate all the time to go anywhere.
Probally not exactly the fastest way to get ther ("howd you get here? We left after you in a ship that was thought up of about 14 years after you left. Doh!") But it could be the first step to intergalatic conquest.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
It's a trick question. It would take you much longer to turn around (assuming for the sake of argument that you can stay within the dictates of the law of conservation of angular momentum by spinning like a flywheel) than the day it'd take for the light to travel -- even if you could do it at the speed of light, you'd have to sweep out an arc of pi*1lightday.
If you're going to go ahead and disregard contraints like that and posit instantaneous transportation, then go ahead. But don't be surprised if you end up with a paradox. Nature has a wonderful tendency to resolve physical paradoxes before we get to see them.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
That's always been my theory. I think that the 'Dark Matter' problem has always sounded like one of those cheesy Roddenberry pieces of info... Like the inertial dampeners, we hear about them, but there's no science involved, and no proof. Sounds pretty bad. "There's this... uhmmm... Stuff. and it's like, you can't see it, but it's all over! And there's more of it than there is of us, Mmmkay?" I dunno... Now that I've typed that, sounds like Mr Makcey than it does Roddenberry... -Dusty Hodges
From data on nucleosynthesis (thermonuclear reaction hydrogen-> deuterium, tritium, helium, lithium and a little bit of other stuff) and from recent Boomerang data we know that most of the mass in Universe is not in hydrogen or other baryonic matter. It is a simple argument, actually. If density of gas is high, thermonuclear reactions would go much faster and isotopes that are fast to be consumed (deutherium, Helium3) would not survive to our time. But there exist deuterium and other fast burning isotopes in interstellar gas. Therefore, there were not enough gas to account for all mass in the Universe. See this link for details. There is other evidence as well for dark matter that is not hydrogen or other baryonic gas. Hey, I wrote it right this time --- baryons ;-)
Intergalactic gas?
There has to be a great joke in there some where although I can't think of it. Slashdot is letting me down, usually there would be a "Score 3: Funny" somewhere!
Geoff
I love how they call it "fully ionized hydrogen". Last time I checked, fully ionized hydrogen was a fancy term for "a proton".
www.eFax.com are spammers
It is interseting since while an instantaneously closing barn door is not a practical concept, an instantaneous switch (quantum well) is. So:
Suppose you have a light which state is determined by a switch that takes zero time to turn on or off, timed in a halving geometric progression. Thus, the lamp turns on for one second, then off for the next 1/2 second, then on for the next 1/4 second, then off for the next 1/8th and so on. At the end of two seconds, is the lamp on or off?
Mabye it's the fine Jamaican lager talking but that was so funny I just mailed it off to a few non-Slashdotters. Good work, and keep it up! Sadly, it would probably see more use than some of the insane Mini-HOWTOS in my Suse 6.4 disc..
.sig: Now legally binding!
This is just fuel for the trolls you know guys. You coulda said matter or something ;-)
Eh...
I believe the worlds were created in 6 days probably a few thousand years ago. I believe it was in 6 days simply because that's what's recorded in the Bible and that's good enough for me. Anything beyond that is really only speculation. I've heard good creationist arguements and I've heard bad ones. The same goes for evolutionists' arguements. The point is, none of us were there to observe the beginning of the universe, and it cannot be repeated(by us) so it CANNOT be scientifically studied. Neither creationism not evolutionism is science! (As far as evolution, microevolution is fact, macroevolution is not, but evolution of the universe is what I'm discussing here) We can study the universe and guess about it's origins but nothing more. As we learn more about it, yes arguements will change. Some will be better; others will be worse. None can be proven.
How am I supposed to hallucinate with all these swirling colors distracting me?
(I'm not a physicist, but I play one on Slashdot. All of the following may be complete B.S.)
:-/ So the two studies actually agree with each other, and my entire post is moot, right?
I always thought that the amount of mass in the universe was directly related to the curvature of the universe. Too little mass means the universe is open and will expand forever; too much mass means the universe will eventually collapse; just the right amount, and the universe will expand at a constantly decreasing rate, and end up effectively stable.
Physicists have always kind of hoped for the third option, because it makes the math easy. That's why they've been looking for the "extra mass", i.e. dark matter. Now it looks like they've found the extra mass, so we can prove that the universe is flat.
But didn't they just report last week that the universe is open, not flat? Doesn't that contradict this new result?
...
Ahem. And the answer is, no, the report last week also said that the universe is flat. I misremembered.
Well, I'll post anyway, just in case anyone finds it interesting. Besides, I'd like to know if my understanding of this whole question is correct.
MSK
There are two possibilities. Either the steel pole is reasonably thin, or it isn't.
If the pole is thin, then it has a low surface area, and thus (assuming it is suffciently cool that it stays in one piece), it does not emit sufficient radiation to be visible beyond a few hundred miles, let alone an entire light day.
If the pole has sufficient surface area to be visible, it also has sufficient mass to collapse under its own weight to form a black hole, and so emits no visible radiation (yes it emits radiation, but it isn't visible to the human eye).
In either case, any portion of the pole beyond a short distance away from you looks completely black.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
found spewing forth from a formation know as 'Jon Katz'. Scientists were amazed at the quantity of 'fully ionized hydrogen' (known to the common man as 'hot' air) that spews from Mr. Katz on a faily regular basis. "We were astounded," said Prof. Frink, "that this one trash columnist could produce more hydrogen than all of the supermarket tabloids and Mindcraft put together. Und hey!"
/. 'trolls' we quoted as saying "j0n k47z 5Ux0r5!!!" and "Hot grits down my pants", though these may be independant of the Katz Gas discovery. From somewhere in Minnesota, this is Tower, wishing you a gas-free day.
Other preliminary research also indicates that the 'I Love You' worm mail was perpetrated solely to prevent the further distribuion of this 'Katz Gas', as it is known. One high level source, who wishes to remain anonymous claims, "It's only a theory right now, but it stands to reason that by bogging down the internet with more e-mails, and having the larger part of the 'Slashdot community' busy handling problems and bashing Microsoft, the spread of 'Katz Gas' could be minimized."
We'll continue monitoring this phemonenon, as it is noted that other 'Katz Gas' leaks will happen on a regular basis, often choking people with lack of wit and reason. Several
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
You're better off with antimatter-driven rockets, laser-driven lightsails, or the like. With a proton-antiproton annihilation drive (they annihilate to 3 pi-mesons, of which two are charged and can be directed with a magnetic nozzle) you can go between Sol and Alpha Centauri in about a year ship-time (given enough fuel, of course). Using a microwave sail (Star Wisp) you could accelerate a tiny probe at hundreds of G's with a microwave beam and get it to a healthy fraction of c before leaving the solar system; this would get you data from the vicinity of other stars before the end of your academic career. Magsails and such would be great for getting around the Solar System, but utterly useless for travel between stars.
--
This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
does this mean that i'm no longer center of the universe?
All you have to do to accept a 12 billion year-old universe, a 4.3 billion year old Earth, and all that is to assume that God is not malicious and wouldn't play fast and loose with physical laws and other evidence so as to make the world appear to be something it is not. Why would you believe in a God who lies with His creation, anyway? Sounds more like the other guy.
--
This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Awwww,cmon moderate me back up pleeeeeez.I'll be good......promise.
O.K.,O.K. This really was an important discovery.It'll have a lasting effect on theories
on how the universe was formed.It'll piss a lot of people off who disagree with science about creation.It'll provide science with fuel to continue more focused research and buy a lot o'
raisin pie for a lot of nearly out of work researchers.We now can tell how the universe was formed.
We can now also tell how the universe was deformed.16 years ago at that fateful beer and
chilli feed.I saw many a man burst into tears,grown women faint as the wallpaper peeled.
Far away on the horizon faerie penguins saw
a mushroom cloud appear as my flaming sphincter
poot fourth.Hell,fifth and sixth even.But,Praise Bob,as the ozone layer ruptured like a zit this methane entity was sucked into the vaccuum of space by Bobs own divine will.There to this day
it roams the universe destroying whole alien civilizations as it seeks the hydrogen
at the end of the universe.Oh the humanity!what noxious gasses passes from our asses.As tho' we'd
dined on turpentine and blackstrap molasses.Singes
your hair and cracks your glasses.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
"This is important because it confirms some of the Big Bang models that predict how much hydrogen should have been created."
i'm not sure how this "confirms" the models.... isn't the probability that we have it right approximately 0.0000? it seems to me that "confirming" any theoretical hypothesis is impossible, given that there are infinitely many viable explanations for given phenomena.
predictive value may factor heavily in how much we value a given hypothesis, but it is only a value along with elegance, fit to the current data, ease of calculation, relevance to current research, etc.
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
I'd just like to say that this backs up my argument that WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) do not exist and that they're a hack to explain something thats unknown. This newly detected gas, as well as newly discovered evidence of very very small and less luminous white dwarf stars removes part of the need for WIMPs to explain things.
Read the press release carefully. This discovery only helps us account for the matter we know how to detect directly at the present time. Dark matter is necessary at many levels: from the local environment near the sun to galactic structure to the fate of the universe. Dark matter is expected to exist due to observed effects of it's mass: it creates impressive graviational dynamics that cannot be explained by visible matter alone.
mh
all you have to do is accept Jesus Christ as the son of God who died for YOUR sins on the cross.
God does not lie.
Josh
For a start, this gas that they have detected is nothing to do with the requirement for dark matter of some kind at all - it merely means that we can detect all of the regular, baryonic matter that we believe to be present based on our calculations. We still need dark matter to account for the stability of galaxies and so on.
Anyway, dark matter doesn't have to be WIMPs in particular. There are other options - massive neutrinoes, MACHOs and so on. Don't get tied up into thinking there's only one alternative.
Another point I'd like to make (started by a small error in the inital /. posting) is that intergalactic neutral hydrogen has been studied for a long time by the exact same techniques used by Tripp, Jenkins, & Savage: looking at very distant, bright objects like quasars and finding neutral hydrogen spectral lines along the line of sight to the object.
What's new here is that they have detected highly-ionized oxygen without a substantial neutral couterpart. There must be a substantial amount of ionized hydrogen that is associated as a result.
Unlike star-forming regions (like the Orion nebula) where ionized hydrogen is more easily detected, the ionized hydrogen associated with this state of oxygen (it's missing 5 electrons!) is extremely difficult to detect directly. The high temperatures and low densities in these regions keep the protons and electrons from easily rejoining and producing the tell-tale cascade of light from an ionized gas that illuminates star-forming regions. Any neutral hydrogen which does manage to form is quickly rammed by high speed particles and re-ionized, escaping our detection by other techniques.
As a sidenote, these kinds of highly-ionized regions are found close by in our own galaxy. In the most obvious cases the gas has been heated to great temperatures by supernovae explosions. The sun is actually sitting in one, affectionately known as the Local Bubble.
These new regions found in intergalactic space may be fossil remants of early, vigorous star-formation in distant galaxies that has been ejected into intergalactic space. Or, they maybe something entirely new!
mh
Only problem with this is that it is very hard to find a perfectly rigid body that large...if nto impossible. Although I do believe that most sub atomic particles are considered to be totally rigid particles.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
If large ammounts of not only interstellar but intergalactic hydrogen exist out there, it may eliminate the need for "dark matter" in explaining the continued expansion of the universe.
If there wasn't an appreciable amount of intergalactic hydrogen out there, my thesis would have been very dull indeed, since it hinged on imaging the distribution of high-temperature (around 10^9K) electrons trapped in the gravity well found in clusters of galaxies. There the group I was working with used radio interferometry techniques to produce maps of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect like this one . This matter can also be 'seen' by it's effect on gravitational lensing, where the additional matter affects the strength of the lensing. So the presence of this ionized hydrogen is well known - those electrons had to come from somewhere! Using highly ionized oxygen as a tracer for fully ionized hydrogen is the interesting step here, and I hope they have some really solid connection between the two because this entire publication rests on the assumption that oxygen is accurately tracing the hydrogen.
There is a bias in astronomy that unless you prove it in the optical wavelengths you haven't proved it at all, and this looks like one of those announcements.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
. As usual, Spaceref.com had this posted yesterday, Slashdot is tad slow on the uptake where space science and exploration is concerned.
I don't know what time Spaceref.com posted it, but I know that I posted it here on the already started Hubble Thread yesterday morning at 7:47am.
SlashDot is a community effort, you have to credit the posts to already started threads in addition to new threads announced by Rob & Hemos, et al.
Meanwhile, we now have two new Astronomy threads started this morning, but none on the REAL Astronomical (and Astrological!) story of the day.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Too bad nobody in Kansas will be allowed to read it. :-)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
The article sez that the gas is invisible because it has been fully ionized, i.e., it no longer has electrons. Well, wouldn't that just be protons? Why do they call it hydrogen if it's just a bunch of protons?
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
This is from "A Brief History of Time", by Stephen Hawking. I've heard other sources for this annecdote;
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"Your very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady, "But it's turtles all the way down!"
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
This week, a million fraternity brothers rushed to join NASA. The reason: scientists have discovered beer in space.
Well, not beer exactly. But they did find alcohol: ethyl alcohol, to be precise, the active ingredient in all major alcoholic drinks (antifreeze Jell-O shots, quite obviously, are exempted from this category). Three British scientists, Drs. Tom Millar, Geoffrey MacDonald and Rolf Habing, discovered this interstellar Everclear floating in a gas cloud in the contellation of Aquila (sign of the Eagle, the mascot of Anheuser-Busch! Hmmmmm).
Millar and his compatriots have estimated the size of this gas cloud at approximately 1,000 times the diameter of our own solar system; there's enough alcohol out there, they say, to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer. These guys are British, mind you; if you were to translate this in terms of American beer (which the British, with some justification, regard as fermented club soda), the amount of potential brewski just about doubles.
In human terms: remember that double-keg party you threw at the end of your Junior year in college (the second Junior year)? Imagine throwing that same party, every eight hours, for the next 30 billion years. You'd STILL have beer left over. And boy, would YOUR bathroom be a mess! Simply put, no one could ever drink 400 trillion trillion pints of beer, except maybe Buffalo Bills fans.
The sheer volume of all this alcohol begs the question of how it managed to get out there in the first place. Despite the simplifying effect it has on the human brain, ethyl alcohol is a reasonably complex molecule: two carbon atoms, five hydrogen atoms, and a hydroxyl radical, all cavorting together in beery camaraderie. It's not a compund that is going to spontaneously arise out of the cold depths of space. It can lead to speculation: What is this cloud?
1.It's God's beer. After all, He worked for six days creating the universe, and on the seventh day, He rested. And after you've had a hard week at the office, don't YOU grab a beer? Since man is made in God's image, it could be that this cloud is the remaining evidence of the first, and best, Miller Time.
2.It's Purgatory ("400 trillion trillion bottles of beer on the wall, 400 trillion trillion bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, three hundred ninety-nine septillion, nine hundred ninety-nine sextillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quintillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine, bottles of beer on the wall!")
3.Proof of an undeniably highly advanced but chronically dipsomaniac alien society. This particular theory is shaky, however: it's reasonable to assume that if the aliens were going to construct a nebula of alcohol, they'd also have large clouds of Beer Nuts and pretzels nearby for snacking. Advanced spectral analysis has yet to locate them.
The truth of the matter, however, is far more prosaic. In the middle of this gas cloud is a young and no doubt quite inebriated star. As the star heats up and contracts, sucking the dust and gas of the cloud into a smaller area, complex molecules form as a result of greater interaction between the elements. Ethyl alcohol forms on small motes of dust in the cloud, and then, as the motes angle in closer towards the star and heat up, the alcohol is released from the motes in gaseous form.
And there you have it: an alcohol cloud. Or, as Dave Bowman might say, "My God! It's full of booze!"
Enough with the science lesson, you say. Just tell me how to GET there! Sorry, Chuckles. You can't get there from here. The gas cloud (which, by the way, has the utterly romantic name of "G34.3") is 10,000 light years away: 58 quadrillion miles. Even if you hijacked the shuttle and headed out with thrusters on full, by the time you got there, the guy in Purgatory would be done with his tune. You'd have had time to work up a powerful thirst, but you'd also be, in a word, dead.
No, the Space Beer Cloud will have to wait for the far future, when men can leap through the universe at warp speed. One can only imagine what they will do when they get there:
Captain Kirk: My....GOD! Sulu! What....is....THAT?
Sulu: It's a free floating cloud of alcohol, sir.
Kirk: And we've just run out of Romulan Ale! Could it be a trap, Bones?
Bones: Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a distiller of fine spirits!
Kirk: We need that booze! But if we fly through that cloud, we'll be too drunk to drive!
Spock: May I remind you, Captain, that I am a Vulcan. We are a race of designated drivers.
Kirk: Well, all righty, then. Spock, drive us through! Bones and I will be out on the hull. With our mouths... open!
To boldly drink what no man has drunk before.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Todd Tripp (the main author of this work) was my office mate until a few years ago and his collaborator Blair Savage is just down the hall from me.
The problem is that we can only directly see matter which is giving off light (i.e. stars). How do we study the cold, non-glowing matter in the universe? The solution is that you find a very bright, very far away source to act as a light bulb. In this case it is a quasar. The quasar itself it not important. If there is anything in between us and the quasar, it might block some of the light. However, this is tricky because different matter aborbs different light.
Normal hydrogen (one proton and one electron) is good at absorbing some visible light. When the light hits, it energizes the electron. After some random time, the electron calms down and re-emits the light, but usually not in the same direction from which it came. Thus, you lose a lot of light along the original line of sight.
However, in hot gas, there is thermal energy to knock the electrons entirely free. (picture hydrogen atoms smacking into each other very hard) In this case, the protons and electrons alone are terrible at blocking incoming light: they are nearly transparent. The trick that many spectroscopists use is to look for "tracers." A tracer is a substance that coexists with hydrogen but is much less transparent.
In this case, oxygen is the tracer. Oxygen is usually about 1500 times less common than hydrogen in our solar system and about 6000 times less commmon in typical interstellar gas clouds in our galaxy. One of the difficulties in this work is to figure out what is the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen. For intergalactic gas it is almost certainly lower than the above numbers (because oxygen comes primarily from stars and there are virtually no stars in intergalactic space). If you think you know this number, you can extrapolate how much hydrogen is there by measuring the amount of oxygen. We can guess this ratio by looking at the ratio of oxygen to other elements, like iron, nitrogen, etc -- whatever is available to be seen. But it's *very* difficult work.
Previous studies found tons of cold, normal hydrogen, but this one is special because it looked for the hot gas and found it.
Chris Dolan, astro grad student
The article says that 360,000 degrees Fahrenheit is 100,000 Kelvin. They are off by a factor of 2. The correct answer is closer to 200,000 K.
No wonder their space vehicles keep crashing.
You should read about the "Sokal affair" - you'd find it entertaining.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Chris Dolan
What you are saying (without having the intelligence to realise) is that you do not understand science.
Science is all about creating models (or hypothesis) based on observation, using these models to make predictions, and then checking these predictions.
In this case the model, or hypothesis, predicted that, if it was true, extra baryonic mass was needed. The extra mass appears to have been found. More evidence for the hypothesis
Mark Austin
---- For Whigs admit no force but argument
That Big Bang guy must have had the farts real bad.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
If you're really interested in this stuff, check out the paper "Where are the baryons?" by Cen and Ostriker -- sorry I can't give you a better reference, but hunt on astro-ph or the Harvard abstract service and you'll find it.