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Title: 'The Models Were Right!' Astronomers Locate Universe's 'Missing'
Matter

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/21/0...

It's not dark matter, writes Space.com. But astronomers have discovered "a
vast tendril of hot gas linking four galaxy clusters and stretching out for
23 million light-years, 230 times the length of our galaxy. "With 10 times
the mass of the Milky Way, this filamentary structure accounts for much of
the universe's 'missing matter,' the search for which has baffled scientists
for decades...." [I]t is "ordinary matter" made up of atoms, composed of
electrons, protons, and neutrons (collectively called baryons) which make up
stars, planets, moons, and our bodies. For decades, our best models of the
universe have suggested that a third of the baryonic matter that should be
out there in the cosmos is missing. This discovery of that missing matter
suggests our best models of the universe were right all along. It could also
reveal more about the "Cosmic Web," the vast structure along which entire
galaxies grew and gathered during the earlier epochs of our 13.8 billion-year-
old universe.... The newly observed filament isn't just extraordinary in
terms of its mass and size; it also has a temperature of a staggering 18
million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius). That's around 1,800
times hotter than the surface of the sun... The team's research was published
on Thursday (June 19) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Models of
the cosmos (including the standard model of cosmology) "have long posited the
idea that the missing baryonic matter of the universe is locked up in vast
filaments of gas stretching between the densest pockets of space..." the
article points out. But now thanks to Suzaku, a Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency (JAXA) satellite, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, "a team
of astronomers has for the first time been able to determine the properties
of one of these filaments, which links four galactic clusters in the local
universe." Team leader Konstantinos Migkas (of the Netherlands' Leiden
Observatory) explained the significance of their finding. "For the first
time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the
cosmos - something that's not happened before." "It seems that the
simulations were right all along."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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