Help support TMP


"Missing Matter problem "solved"?" Topic


7 Posts

All members in good standing are free to post here. Opinions expressed here are solely those of the posters, and have not been cleared with nor are they endorsed by The Miniatures Page.

In order to respect possible copyright issues, when quoting from a book or article, please quote no more than three paragraphs.

For more information, see the TMP FAQ.


Back to the Science Plus Board


Areas of Interest

General

Featured Hobby News Article


Featured Link


Featured Workbench Article

Painting Dapple Grey Horses

A guide to how Stronty Girl Fezian paints grey horses - specifically, dapple greys.


Featured Profile Article

The Training of an Assistant Editor

How a two-year search for an Assistant Editor finally ended.


Current Poll


Featured Book Review


293 hits since 10 Oct 2017
©1994-2024 Bill Armintrout
Comments or corrections?

John the OFM10 Oct 2017 10:42 a.m. PST

link

That's above my pay grade, but it seems like there's an awful lot of "real matter" in the universe, and it's messily scattered.
Maybe all those Dark Matter calculations were… premature.

goragrad10 Oct 2017 4:00 p.m. PST

Are they really sure about this – after all, the consensus models say something different.

And when in doubt…

PaddySinclair10 Oct 2017 4:27 p.m. PST

Are they really sure about this – after all, the consensus models say something different.

Except that's actually what they are confirming. We'd previously only observed 50% of the predicted 5% (i.e. 2.5%) "real matter" from those models, so we were short. this research points to where it actually seems to lie.

Bowman10 Oct 2017 5:06 p.m. PST

……there's an awful lot of "real matter" in the universe…….

Dark matter is real matter. It's just that it doesn't radiate any energy so we can't see it. Neutrinos also do not radiate any energy but they are certainly real.

Maybe all those Dark Matter calculations were… premature.

Doubtful. Dark Matter was first described by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 to explain the differences in the movements and masses of galaxies in the Coma Cluster. To put that in perspective, Edwin Hubble determined that the universe was expanding by observing Cepheid variable stars only 4 years earlier. Neither concepts can be considered premature 85-90 years later.

I'm not sure either Tanimura or de Groot have visual evidence of these baryonic filaments, their observations fit well into complex modelling systems. Therefore these filaments are still considered Dark Matter. It's just that we possibly have a better understanding where this missing mass can be found.

…….after all, the consensus models say something different.

They do? Not according to de Groot, et al.:

"Cosmological simulations predict that the 'missing baryons' are spread throughout filamentary structures in the cosmic web, forming a low density gas with temperatures of 105−107 K. Previous attempts to observe this warm-hot filamentary gas via X-ray emission or absorption in quasar spectra have proven difficult due to its diffuse and low-temperature nature. Here we report a 5.1σ detection of warm-hot baryons in stacked filaments through the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect, which arises from the distortion in the cosmic microwave background spectrum due to ionised gas."

arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378v1

Paddy is correct. This seems to support the consensus view.

Now does that make this all correct and accurate? No idea. The explanations and calculations that indicate the existence of these filaments and the Monte Carlo null tests that establish the reliability of the evidence is beyond my pay grade too. wink

Bowman10 Oct 2017 5:13 p.m. PST

Of course, John, you can still fret about the 70% of the Universe that is Dark Energy! laugh

Winston Smith10 Oct 2017 5:31 p.m. PST

Oh yeah. That has me waking up and gibbering into the night!

Bowman15 Oct 2017 6:12 p.m. PST

"Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before.

"There's no sweet spot – no sweet instrument that we've invented yet that can directly observe this gas," says Richard Ellis at University College London. "It's been purely speculation until now."

link

Sorry - only verified members can post on the forums.