Astronomers Find Part Of Universe’s Missing Matter

Consider one more astronomical mystery solved. Scientists have located a sizeable chunk of the universe that seemed to be missing since back when the stars first formed. It’s floating in super-hot rivers of gas, invisible to the naked eye, surrounding galaxies like our own.

And a completely different kind of mystery matter -- dark matter -- may have put it there.

The results appear in the current issue of the journal Nature.

To make this latest discovery, astronomers at Ohio State University and their colleagues used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to take the highest-quality spectrum of its type ever made.

Though astronomers had previously detected the rivers of gas with X-ray telescopes, this is the first time that the gas has been studied in enough detail to calculate how much of it is out there. The amount of gas matches the amount of material that went missing 10 billion years ago, said Smita Mathur, associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State.

She and doctoral student Rik Williams did this work with astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the University of California, Berkeley, the Instituto de Astronomia in Mexico, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lead author on the paper is Fabrizio Nicastro of CfA

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050205074635.htm

 

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If the observation holds up, then it will also explain a puzzle. This extra gas would provide the mass necessary to provide the supposedly non-keplarian high rotation speeds of stars in the galaxy.

 

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