jueves, 28 de mayo de 2020

Astronomers find 'missing matter', solving decades-long mystery of outer space - ABC News

Astronomers find 'missing matter', solving decades-long mystery of outer space - ABC News

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder with a star-filled sky in the background.

Found: most of of the cosmos’s stuff

Astronomers have detected much othe Universe’s ordinary matter, which had long been missing from accounts of its total mass. Not ‘dark matter’ — the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up the majority of the Universe’s contents. This is normal matter, but it’s spread so sparsely across intergalactic space that more than three-quarters of it is almost undetectable. Using an array of 36 radio telescopes in remote Western Australia, researchers analysed the light from 6 fast radio bursts (FRBs), unusually energetic events that last just milliseconds and originate in other galaxies. The spectrum was sensitive enough to reveal the exceedingly thin matter that the FRBs met in their travels. “The missing matter was equivalent to only one or two atoms in a room the size of an average office," says radio astronomer Jean-Pierre Macquart.
ABC | 6 min readSource: Nature paper

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