Student Finds Universe's Missing Mass

An anonymous reader writes "A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called 'missing mass' of the universe during her summer break."

Comments

They found something else, too...

[damn_registrars]

They managed to find a female astrophysics student. Anyone in physics can tell you that is a great discovery in and of itself.

Re:They found something else, too...

[PastaLover]

This is why we can't have nice things.

Another source for the story

[Billy the Mountain]

http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/Aussie+student+finds+universe+missing+mass/4851185/story.html

Re:Different perspective needed.

[Dog-Cow]

Of course it was. She's Australian!

Re:Noteworthiness

[XiaoMing]

Any astrophysicists (or at least postgrads) here to say how important or true this achievement really is?

The article (got to it prior Newton's First Law of ./ effect) actually did quite a good job of addressing exactly that.

Takeaways were:
-Missing mass (not dark matter, but matter which was seen to exist during creation of universe but is now someplace different) turns out to have migrated to filaments that span across the universe.
-Claimed that astrophysicists have long postulated (~2 decades) that the mass had moved there, but that the imaging capabilities weren't able to resolve it.
-Then in a fit of bipolar impetus, also went on to say how exciting a discovery this was for the community.
-Finally acknowledged that most likely nothing useful (to mankind) will come of this discovery.

Ok, interestingish

[jd]

A student has found that if you observe in the x-ray range you discover ordinary matter between the galaxies that was clearly evident in the early universe and isn't visible in other parts of the spectrum.

I'm not sure that it's altogether news that different frequencies let you see different things - to me, by far the biggest news is that despite having x-ray telescopes for a very long time and computers quite capable of crunching that data to detect potentially interesting observations, the astronomers have been opting for cheap student labor instead.

Re:Ok, interestingish

[Xerxes314]

Here's the paper: An estimate of the electron density in filaments of galaxies at z~0.1.

The student got listed as first author, which is cool for her. The paper itself is a follow-up to Pimbblet's (the actual prof with the actual grant) 2004 study of filaments. The major finding seems to be that the press is gullible enough to print anything if you say an undergrad did the work. In this case, the press manages to avoid looking like total idiots, since the study is pretty cool and interesting. Nonetheless, the hype is vastly out of proportion to the significance.

Re:age

[hackertourist]

Perhaps more surprising is the prof's willingness to share credit for the discovery with his student.

Re:Noteworthiness

[radtea]

Any astrophysicists (or at least postgrads) here to say how important or true this achievement really is?

It's fairly significant. They have confirmed that some fraction of the missing baryonic matter (the ordinary stuff we are made of, like Galactic Dark Matter, not the exotic new-particle stuff) is in the filaments that exist on very large scales in the universe. If they had failed to find it the result would have been more interesting, but even so they've done a good bit of science by testing the idea that the missing baryonic matter is in these filaments by actually going and looking for it rather than taking it on faith that it must be there.

We know there is missing baryonic matter because we know what the baryonic density in the universe is from the primordial helium/hydrogen ratio. Free neutrons only live about fifteen minutes, so as the Big Bang cooled and neutrons and protons condensed out of the primordial quark-gluon plasma there was a relatively short interval in which helium could form. We know the size of the universe at that time from the temperature, and we know the density because the denser it was the more neutrons would have been captured onto protons to form heavier isotopes, so by figuring out the primordial density of deuterium, helium and lithium we can put pretty strong constraints on the total baryonic mass of the universe.

Re:Kinda OT - black holes

[kehren77]

The closing line about justifying funding for pure physics research 'Do you use a mobile phone? Some of that technology came about by black hole research'."

To what bit of mobile phone technology is he referring?

AT&T's network.

Horrible article/summary

[forand]

The summary and article are making a mountain out of a mole hill. The student did good work but did not 'find the missing mass' in the universe. Here is a link to the publicly accessible article on arXiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0711
The abstract does not make any grandiose claims of finding the missing mass of the universe but instead states how the article presents properties of mass in filaments.

Re:Next up...

[boristdog]

Well, the missing mass was being held by the Space Pope...

Re:age

[Kjella]

Why is it that the younger the person who does something, the more special people think it is? I call it the "America's Got Talent" effect.

At least in science it seems the body of human knowledge continues to expand. Like many of the math theorems that requires years of field theory and calculus to even understand WTF the theorem is about. Try for example reading the proof of Fermat's last theorem without developing a brain aneurysm. It's like they talk Greek and Latin and ancient Hebrew and something you could swear is alien.

That young people still discover things is proof there's still low hanging fruit or that exceptional talent matters more than a PhD and 20 years of working with the subject matter. Of course there's many cookie cutter professors too but usually there are some that are exceptional talents and PhDs and have worked on it 20 years who has picked clean any reasonably accessible discovery.

Same with for example physics, unless you're at the Tevatron or CERN it's unlikely you'll find any new elementary particles, add any new entries to the periodic table, build carbon nanotubes, high-temperature superconductors or anything else that will make a huge impact, compared to the relatively simple lab equipment 100 years ago. That's why the young ones are news, because they're the exceptions.

Re:age

[Ogive17]

That young people still discover things is proof there's still low hanging fruit or that exceptional talent matters more than a PhD and 20 years of working with the subject matter. Of course there's many cookie cutter professors too but usually there are some that are exceptional talents and PhDs and have worked on it 20 years who has picked clean any reasonably accessible discovery.

What I think it means is that when you've been working on something so long you tend to lose focus on something obvious. It takes a fresh pair of eyes without a vested interest to make the connection.

she didn't find anything

[iamhassi]

Actually it seems she didn't find anything:
"Ms Fraser-McKelvie said the ‘Eureka moment’ came when Dr Lazendic-Galloway closely examined the data they had collected. “Using her expert knowledge in the X-ray astronomy field, Jasmina (Dr Lazendic-Galloway) re-analyzed our results to find that we had in fact detected the filaments in the results, where previously we believed we had not.”"

So the student found nothing, it wasn't until an expert looked at it and actually found the mass.

So I guess it depends on your perspective as to if the student found it or not. If you're throwing out a bunch of "junk" and an expert goes through it and discovers a priceless artifact does that mean you discovered it or did the expert?