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Hubble Survey Finds Half of the Missing Matter
esocid sends along the news that scientists believe they have found about half the missing matter in the universe. The matter we can see is only about 1/8 of the total baryonic matter believed to exist (and only 1/200 the mass-energy of the visible universe). This missing matter is not to be confused with "dark matter," which is thought to be non-baryonic. The missing stuff has been found in the intergalactic medium that extends essentially throughout all of space, from just outside our galaxy to the most distant regions of space. "'We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe,' Mike Shull of the University of Colorado explained. 'What we are confirming in detail is that intergalactic space, which intuitively might seem to be empty, is in fact the reservoir for most of the normal, baryonic matter in the universe.'"
I knew someone was going to make an ether comment. The luminiferous ether was the hypothecial medium that electromagnetic waves (including light) traveled through. It was hypothesized because, at the time, there were no known waves that traveled without a medium. However, the ether was disproven, and it was shown that EM waves travel without a medium. What's mentioned in the article is not ether.
This isn't dark matter. Dark matter shows evidence (based on its measured distribution) which is not consistent with ordinary baryonic matter.
We know that there is some sort of matter missing due to weird graviational interactions. We also know that according our measurements of the cosmic microwave background, this matter doesn't exist, i.e., this matter doesn't interact with electromagnetic fields. That's why it's not normal baryonic matter.
Therefore, we say that there must be dark matter. Plain old dust would have showed up in our readings of the CMB.
More things that were supposed to be dark matter that turned out to be pretty ordinary matter.
No, that's not true. We already knew there was "ordinary" matter we hadn't found, we knew it wasn't "dark" matter, we just didn't know where it was. Now we found a bunch of it.
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Wouldn't it make more sense to go with an aether theory? [...] How about gravity increasing the optical density of the aether?
The problem with ether theories is mainly the Michelson-Morley experiment. Are there ether theories which avoid the MM pitfall? Sort of. The Polarizable Vacuum (PV) is a very interesting theory along the lines of what the the above poster suggested. Instead of matter bending some mysterious "ether", as in ether theories, or bending space-time, as in relativity, matter instead affects the electric and magnetic permeability of space, which causes light to behave as if it were passing through a medium with a higher dialectric constant. From that simple assumption, we can almost rederive full general relativity (GR) wherein electromagnetic equations produce gravitational effects. Gravity is electromagnetism! PV has since been disproven, but it's still a stunningly simple way to think about gravitation in terms of electromagnetism.
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The universe likely has neutral charge. Also see a more detailed discussion on the subject.
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Thanks! I found the answer, and read some very interesting discussion in the links you provided. Interesting that though I have been reading about physics and astronomy for many years, I have never run into this kind of discussion before...
"The electromagnetic force is so strong that if the universe had even a slight net charge, electric and magnetic fields should dominate the structure of our universe. But it doesn't -- gravity does. And gravity, believe it or not, is a very weak force. There are other effects that electric and magnetic fields would have on light, and we simply do not see these effects."
"If a gas in ionized it simply means that some electrons have separated from the constituent atoms (or molecules) that make up the gas leaving positively charged atoms/molecules and negatively charged electron. However they are still mixed together in the same gas, the 'separation' that you assume does not exist. The positive and negative charges still mingle in the same space. Even if you took a very small volume (the size of a grain of sand) of an ionized gas the overall charge is still neutral."
It's not quite like that... Quantum states' collapse is barely real in the sense that we know it. In particular, it doesn't carry information - so the experiments we already have, which indicate that what we call collapse is a non-local phenomenon (carries faster than the speed of light, possibly instantly), don't contradict special relativity.
Yes, you read correctly - to all our best measurements, collapse appears instantaneous, not like a propagating change in a wave.