Has Missing Matter of the Universe been Located?

I've read articles not long ago where some scientists questions the existence of dark matter. Dark matter is what's thought making up for the missing matter of the universe, but recent discoveries might give a completely different answer. I'll provide some quotes from the article, and provide the hyperlink to the entire article below.

One of the great, unsolved mysteries of 21st-century science is the existence of the missing matter of the universe. Using observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, astronomers detected a vast reservoir of intergalactic gas about 400 million light years from Earth. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the "missing matter" in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas.

The mystery then is where does this missing matter reside in the nearby Universe? This latest work supports predictions that it is mostly found in a web of hot, diffuse gas known as the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM).

Scientists think the WHIM is material left over after the formation of galaxies, which was later enriched by elements blown out of galaxies.

"Evidence for the WHIM is really difficult to find because this stuff is so diffuse and easy to see right through," said Taotao Fang of the University of California at Irvine and lead author of the latest study. "This differs from many areas of astronomy where we struggle to see through obscuring material."

Confirmed detections of the WHIM have been made difficult because of its extremely low density. Using observations and simulations, scientists calculate the WHIM has a density equivalent to only 6 protons per cubic meter. For comparison, the interstellar medium -- the very diffuse gas in between stars in our galaxy -- typically has about a million hydrogen atoms per cubic meter.

"Evidence for the WHIM has even been much harder to find than evidence for dark matter, which is invisible and can only be detected indirectly," said Fang.

Source: Has Missing Matter of the Universe Been Located? (A Galaxy Classic)

By no means is this a definite answer to the question, but it's predicted that this gas makes up for most of the missing matter. And as we all know, humans are not infallible, and it's not necessarily true that it discounts the existence of dark matter either.

Anyway, I thought it might be an interesting read, and I hope you'll enjoy it.

diffused gases i think can really account for some of dark matter.

s&f

i think dark matter is just a sub atomic particle that fills all of space and is not bonded by the presence of matter or gravity, but hey, what do i know?

Ignore my lack of understanding in this matter (no pun intended) but if darkk matter makes up the majority % of the known universe as we are currently belive then why do we look for it in the outer reaches of space? Wouldnt it be here, in our homes, in our lives and in my little apartment?

Nice find. Seems to make more sense than "dark matter"...

Hopefully BP won't build a rig to try to extract it

Wait...

So they threw out Dark Matter theory on a WHIM?

Originally posted by Master Shen long
Ignore my lack of understanding in this matter (no pun intended) but if darkk matter makes up the majority % of the known universe as we are currently belive then why do we look for it in the outer reaches of space? Wouldnt it be here, in our homes, in our lives and in my little apartment?

Bacause when dark matter and regular matter interacts, they destroy each other and releases pure energy. If I'm not completely mistaken, CERN has been able to attain a minute quantity of dark matter with their LHC. But how they manage to contain it I don't know anything about.

Originally posted by rogerstigers
Wait...

So they threw out Dark Matter theory on a WHIM?

I guess you could say so

[edit on 16/7/10 by Droogie]

reply to post by Droogie


I don't think that dark matter is intended to be the same thing as anti-matter. Anti-matter will annihalate normal matter. I always thought that dark matter was just matter we couldn't see.

reply to post by rogerstigers


Thanks for pointing that out, there is probably a distinction between the two. It is imaginable that dark matter is antimatter, but it is unlikely because then we would probably see huge bursts of energy in form of light.

I've managed to mix up the two, and I appologize for that.

[edit on 16/7/10 by Droogie]

reply to post by Droogie


I think you are confusing the writings of Dan Brown (Angels And Demons) with known cosmology. Dark matter is not believed to be antimatter and if it was, 6 protons per cubic meter coming into contact with regular matter would hardly produce bright flashes. CERN hasn't specifically produced it in the L.H.C. and stored either.

That said, the missing mass comprising of low density gas sounds believable, in fact, when I read about dark matter, my first thought was something like that but apparently Astrophysicists were pretty darn sure that dark matter is something entirely different.

Hot diffuse gas. Can you say plasma?

reply to post by OZtracized


Thanks for your input. And yeah, I've got no defense against my previous post, I'm still learning about astronomy and physics. I thought it was an interesting read though, especially the part that it's harder to detect WHIM than dark matter. And just one question, do you know anything about how they detect dark matter?

reply to post by Droogie


Funnily enough, they can't detect dark matter. The reason it's said to exist is because scientists have calculated the estimated mass of the known universe (I'm not sure of the exact method but I believe it's rooted in Newtonian physics, the mass of an object gravitationally influences another and this is applied at a larger scale) and lo and behold, "normal" matter can only account for around 4% of the matter required to match observations. It is believed that pretty much all the normal matter in the universe has clumped into stars, planets and asteroids etc which are visible and detectable so the other 96% is supposedly made up of dark matter and dark energy. It's proponents believe it is not made up of the elements known to us.

In other words, their calculations are way off observation so they threw in this magical dark matter that nobody can see and nobody knows anything about to make their calculations add up.

reply to post by OZtracized


Now this is interesting. Sounds pretty much like religion to me.