Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday May 29 2020, @07:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-THERE-you-are! dept.

Half the matter in the universe was missing—we found it hiding in the cosmos:

In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5%, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at the time, they came up short. By a lot.

The sum of all the ordinary matter that cosmologists measured only added up to about half of the 5% what was supposed to be in the universe.

This is known as the "missing baryon problem" and for over 20 years, cosmologists like us looked hard for this matter without success.

It took the discovery of a new celestial phenomenon and entirely new telescope technology, but earlier this year, our team finally found the missing matter.

[...] But when radio waves pass through matter, they are briefly slowed down. The longer the wavelength, the more a radio wave "feels" the matter. Think of it like wind resistance. A bigger car feels more wind resistance than a smaller car.

The "wind resistance" effect on radio waves is incredibly small, but space is big. By the time an FRB ["Fast Radio Burst"] has traveled millions or billions of light-years to reach Earth, dispersion has slowed the longer wavelengths so much that they arrive nearly a second later than the shorter wavelengths.

[...] We were overcome by both amazement and reassurance the moment we saw the data fall right on the curve predicted by the 5% estimate. We had detected the missing baryons in full, solving this cosmological riddle and putting to rest two decades of searching.

Journal Reference:
J.-P. Macquart, J. X. Prochaska, M. McQuinn, et al. A census of baryons in the Universe from localized fast radio bursts, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2300-2)

The initial results are based on six data points, FRBs; the researchers will continue to look for others.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @05:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @05:17AM (#1000937)

    T**** 2020