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Half the Universe's Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found (newscientist.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe -- protons, neutrons and electrons -- unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far. Two separate teams found the missing matter -- made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter -- linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. "The missing baryon problem is solved," says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before.

1 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Dark matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Wow, you are so fucking cool to have derived that theory or I should say law of the universe. I canâ(TM)t believe nobody gave you recognition for it. I am fixing to write a stern letter to the Nobel prize committee for overlooking your achievement once again this year and giving it to a trio of guys who merely built a gravity wave detector which lets face it was like a failed volcano at a science fair in comparison to the insights revealed by your magnificent contribution.