Far out cosmology: finding hot gases (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 07, 2020, 20:52 (1257 days ago) @ David Turell

Which may make up for the 40% missing matter:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201106113858.htm

"Astrophysicists consider that around 40% of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complexe cosmic web. Today, scientists may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data.

***

"Galaxies are distributed throughout the Universe in the form of a complex network of nodes connected by filaments, which are in turn separated by voids. This is known as the cosmic web. The filaments are thought to contain almost all of the ordinary (so-called baryonic) matter of the Universe in the form of a diffuse, hot gas. However, the signal emitted by this diffuse gas is so weak that in reality 40 to 50% of the baryons goes undetected.

***

"In a new study, funded by the ERC ByoPiC project, they present a statistical analysis that reveals, for the first time, the X-ray emission from the hot baryons in filaments. This detection is based on the stacked X-ray signal, in the ROSAT[2] survey data, from approximately 15,000 large-scale cosmic filaments identified in the SDSS[3] galaxy survey. The team made use of the spatial correlation between the position of the filaments and the associated X-ray emission to provide evidence of the presence of hot gas in the cosmic web, and for the first time measure its temperature.

"These findings confirm earlier analyses by the same research team, based on indirect detection of hot gas in the cosmic web through its effect on the cosmic microwave background[4]. This paves the way for more detailed studies,..."

Comment: Bit by bit we are unearthing more the universe's structure.