The universe has two types of matter. There is an invisible dark matter, known only for its large -scale gravitational effects. And there is ordinary matter, such as gas, dust, stars, planets and land things such as cookie and canoe mass.
Scientists estimate that ordinary matter constitutes only around 15% of the total, but they have had difficulty documenting their location, since approximately half is unknown. Thanks to powerful bursts of radio waves from 69 points of the cosmos, researchers have found the “missing” matter.
It was mainly hidden as gas finely distributed in the vast intergalaxial extensions, and was detected thanks to the effect that matter has on radio waves that travel through space, according to researchers.
This dim gas composes the intergalactic medium, a kind of fog between galaxies. The scientists had previously determined the total amount of ordinary matter through a calculation that included the observed light, remnant of the Big Bang, occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago, which gave rise to the universe.
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However, they could not find even half of this matter.
“So the question we have been asking was: where is it hidden? The answer seems to be: in a diffuse and dim cosmic network, far from the galaxies,” said Harvard University Astronomy professor, Liam Connor, principal author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The researchers discovered that a smaller portion of the missing matter resides in the halos of diffuse material surrounding the galaxies, including our Milky Way. Ordinary matter is composed of bariones, which are the subatomic particles protons and neutrons necessary to build atoms.
People, planets and stars are made of bariones. The dark matter, on the other hand, is a mysterious substance that constitutes most of the matter of the universe. We do not know what new particle or substance composes dark matter. We know exactly what ordinary matter is, but we did not know where it is, said Connor.
How did so much ordinary matter end in the middle of nowhere?
Large amounts of gas are expelled from galaxies when mass stars explode in supernovae or when supermassive black holes inside the “erucan” galaxies, expelling material after consuming stars or gas.
“If the universe were a more boring place, or the laws of physics were different, we could discover that all ordinary matter would precipitate in galaxies, it would cool and form stars, until each proton and neutron was part of a star. But that is not what happens,” said Connor.
Thus, these violent physical processes are dispersing ordinary matter over immense distances, condemning it to the cosmic desert. This gas is not in its usual state, but in plasma form, with its separate electrons and protons.
The mechanism used to detect and measure the missing ordinary matter was based on phenomena called rapid radio (FRB) bursts, powerful radio wave pulses emanating from remote points of the universe.
While its exact cause remains a mystery, a main hypothesis is that they occur by highly magnetized neutron stars, compact stellar embodies that remain after the death of a massive star in an explosion of Supernova.
As the radio frequency light travels from the FRB source to Earth, it disperses in different wavelengths, similar to how a prism transforms sunlight into a rainbow. The degree of dispersion depends on the amount of matter present in the trajectory of light, which provides the mechanism to locate and measure matter where, otherwise, it would not be found.
The scientists used radio waves from 69 FRB, 39 of which were discovered through a network of 110 telescopes located in the Owens Valley Observatory of Caltech, near Bishop, California, called Deep Synoptic Array.
The remaining 30 were discovered through other telescopes. The FRB were located at distances of up to 9,100 million light years from the Earth, the farthest distance registered.
After considering all ordinary matter, researchers could determine their distribution. Approximately 76}% resides in the intergalactic space, about 15% in the galactic halos and the remaining 9% is concentrated in the galaxies, mainly in the form of stars or gas.
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“Now we can address even more important mysteries on the ordinary matter of the universe,” said Connor. “And beyond that we ask the question about: what is the nature of dark matter and why it is so difficult to measure it directly?”
With Reuters information
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