Missing Matter: Elusive Substance Discovered in the Universe

Experts at the European Space Agency have made a grand announcement: they have found the Universe’s “missing matter.” Scientists know that for our cosmological models to work, the Universe must contain a certain amount of matter – the stuff that makes up everything we can see. The problem is that only a third of that matter has ever been seen, and the rest is missing. And now it appears that it has actually been found.

Experts believe the "missing" matter is in a vast filament of 10 million degree gases stretching through the depths of the universe. This cosmic ribbon, more than 23 million light years long, contains 10 times more matter than our own Milky Way.

The giant thread connects four galaxy clusters, each containing thousands of individual galaxies filled with billions of stars.

The filament extends diagonally from Earth, part of the Shapley Supercluster, the largest structure in the universe made up of 8,000 galaxies. The filament is so long that traveling along it would be like crossing the Milky Way from end to end more than 230 times.

When the gases are compressed by gravity, they produce enormous amounts of energy, causing the gas to become extremely hot. However, because the gas is so diffuse, the filaments emit very faint light, which is difficult to distinguish from the light of nearby galaxies and black holes. It is like trying to see candlelight from a distance next to bright flashlights.

Without the ability to isolate the light coming from the gas itself, astronomers have been unable to figure out how much of the Universe's hidden mass it contains. In a new paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, astronomers have done just that for the first time, using two powerful X-ray telescopes.

The researchers combined observations from the European Space Agency's (ESA) X-ray space telescope XMM-Newton and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Suzaku X-ray space telescope.

While Suzaku mapped faint X-ray emission from gas over a large area, XMM-Newton was able to identify sources of contaminating X-rays, such as supermassive black holes.

Thanks to XMM-Newton, scientists were able to identify and remove these space pollutants, thereby revealing the object of study. For the first time in history, this allowed researchers to determine the properties of the cosmic thread.

In addition to detecting a previously invisible thread of matter running through the Universe, these results show that galaxy clusters are connected to each other over vast distances.

This means that some of the densest and most extreme structures in the Universe may be part of a vast "cosmic web."

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