By Will Dunham
Washington (Reuters) -There are two types of matter. There is an invisible dark matter known only because of its large -scale gravitational effects. And there is ordinary matter such as gas, dust, stars, planets and earthly things like cookies and canoes.
Scientists believe that ordinary matter represents only about 15% of all matter, but has long been struggling to document where all this is, and about half are not reported about half. With the help of powerful radio waves outbursts emitted from 69 places in space, researchers have now found the “missing” matter.
It was mainly hiding as a thinly distributed gas, spread in the huge extensions between galaxies, and was discovered thanks to the effect that the issue has on radio waves traveling through space, the researchers said. This weak gas contains an intergalactic environment, something like a fog between galaxies.
Earlier, scientists determined the total amount of ordinary matter, using a calculation involving observed light that remained from the Big Bang event, approximately about 13.8 billion years, which initiated the universe. But they couldn’t really find half of this question.
“So the question we were fighting was: Where is it hiding? The answer seems: in a diffuse radiant space network, away from galaxies,” said Harvard University Astronomy Professor Liam Connor, a lead author published on Monday at Nature Astronomy.
Researchers have found that a fewer part of the missing fabric is located in the halos of diffuse materials surrounding galaxies, including our Milky Way.
Ordinary matter is made up of Barryons, which are subatomic protons and neutron particles needed to build atoms.
“People, planets and stars are made of barione. Dark matter, on the other hand, is a mysterious substance that constitutes the greater part of the issue in the universe. We do not know what a new particle or substance it creates dark matter. We know exactly what ordinary matter is, we just didn’t know where it was,” Connor said.
So, how did you get so ordinary matter in the middle of nowhere? Large amounts of gas are discarded by galaxies when massive stars erupt in supernovae or when super -fat black holes inside the Burp galaxies, ejecting material after consuming stars or gas.
“If the universe was a more casual place or the laws of physics were different, you may find that ordinary matter would fall into galaxies, cool down, form stars while every proton and neutron were not part of a star. But it does not happen,” Connor said.
In this way, these violent physical processes overcome ordinary matter around vast distances and send it to the cosmic desert. This gas is not in its usual state, but rather in the form of plasma, with its electrons and protons being separated.
The mechanism used to detect and measure the missing ordinary matter included phenomena called fast radio outbursts, or FRBs – powerful impulses of radio waves emitted from distant points in the universe. Although their exact cause remains mysterious, the leading hypothesis is that they are produced by highly magnified neutron stars, the compact star heat, left after a massive star, dies in the explosion of the supernova.
As the light in the frequencies of the radio travel from the source of FRBS to the Earth, it is scattered at different wavelengths, just as the prism turns sunlight into an arc. The degree of this dispersion depends on how much matter it is in the path of light, providing the mechanism for determining and measuring matter where it would otherwise remain unfounded.
Scientists have used radio waves traveling from 69 FRB, 39 of which were discovered using a network of 110 telescopes located on the Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory near Bishop, California called Deep Synoptic Array. The remaining 30 were found with the help of other telescopes.
FRBs were located at distances of up to 9.1 billion light-years from Earth, the farthest of them were recorded. The light year is the remote light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
When all ordinary questions report, the researchers were able to determine its distribution. About 76% reside in intergalactic space, about 15% in galactic halos, and the remaining 9% are concentrated in galaxies, mainly as stars or gas.
“We can now move on to even more important mysteries regarding ordinary matter in the universe,” Connor said. “And beyond that: What is the nature of dark matter and why is it so difficult to measure directly?”
(Reporting by Will Dunham, editing by Rosalba O’Brien)