Half the Universe is missing matter has just been finally found!!

A scientific law called "The Law of Conservation of Mass", discovered by Antoine Lavoisier, in its most compact form says that matter can neither be created nor be destroyed.

Measuring the Hubble flow of variable stars, galaxies, supernovae etc. tells us how much matter, radiations and other forms of energy need to be present. We can also measure the large-scale structure of the Universe and from clustering of galaxies on a variety of scales determine how much total as well as how much is normal matter and how much is dark, there needs to be.

Credit:Image by Nasa 

Firstly moving to the Big Bang, it offers a completely independent piece of data: the total amount of normal matter(atom based) that must exists. From all the different lines of evidence, we see the same picture. The fact that about 5% of the Universe's energy is normal matter, 27% is dark matter and the other 68% is dark energy has been known for nearly 20 years now, but it remains as puzzling as ever. The question is, what the concept of dark matter all about? We know from a slew of observations that dark matter exists and we know its generic properties, yet we have to directly detect it or find the particle(s) responsible for it. And even the normal matter - the stuff made of protons, neutrons and electrons- isn't fully accounted for.

The Universe is missing half its matter. Scientists have faced this cosmological problem for many years, there is a huge imbalance between how much we see and how much our models say, should be there.

Scientists believe that about 70 % of the Universe is made up of dark energy, the mystery force is thought to be driving its expansion. About a quarter is dark matter and the remaining 5% is dark matter- the physical substance that makes up every thing we seen in the universe, including planets, stars and galaxies.

However our observation of normal matter (protons, neutrons ans electrons) only account for about 2.5% of the universe and the rest of it is nowhere to be found. This mismatch is knows as "the missing baryon problem". Two teams of researchers have now claimed to have resolved this issue.

Credit:Image by Nasa

According to new scientist, Hideki Tanimua, from the institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, and Anna de Graaff, fro

m the University of Edinburgh, UK, have in two separate papers found the missing baryons in the hot filaments of gas that link galaxies together.

When the high energy radiation from the first stars passes through intergalactic space, the matter and light completely ignore each other, but the normal matter is vulnerable.

Credit:Image by Nasa 

Coming up to the missing matter again, the Hubble Space Telescope searches for missing ordinary matter, called baryons by looking at the light from quasars several billion light years away. Imprinted on that are the spectral fingerprints of the missing ordinary matter that absorbs the light at specific frequencies shown in the colorful spectra at right. The missing baryonic matter helps trace out the structure of intergalactic space, called the "cosmic web".

Credit:Image by Nasa

Probing the vast cosmic web will be a key goal for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) a $ 70 million instrument designed and built by CU-Boulder with Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. of Boulder to probe the nearby galaxies and the distant universe. Astronauts plans to install it on Hubble during a servicing  mission later this year.

The COS team hopes to observe 100 additional quasars and build up a survey of more than 10,000 hydrogen filaments in the cosmic web, many laced with heavy elements from early stars.

The two confirmed that the missing ordinary matter in the universe can be found in the form of filaments of hot, diffuse gas linking galaxies together.

Credit:Image by Nasa

While long predicted, these gases have a tenuous nature that has made them impossible to detect using X-ray telescopes. To get around that, both team made use of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. This phenomenon occurs when leftover light from the Big Bang passes through hot gases, leaving behind a trace of the gas that can be captured. A map of this effect within the observable universe was produced by the Planck satellite in 2015.

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, each team chose pairs of galaxies supposedly connected by baryon strands. Then to make the faint individual signals more visible they stacked the Planck signals for these areas. The team at IAS combined 260,000 pairs of galaxies, while the Edinburgh team worked with more than a million pairs.

Their findings were similar. The IAS group found the baryon gases to be three times denser than the normal mass of matter in the universe, while the other group found them to be six times denser. In short, both found definitive evidences that the gas between the galaxies was dense enough to form filaments.

"The missing baryon is solved," Tanimua told the magazine. "We expected some differences [between the density] because we are looking at filaments at different distances. If this factor is included, our findings are very consistent with the group."