Posted on 05/12/2008 7:05:51 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Astronomers have found a piece of the universe's puzzle that's been missing for awhile: a type of extremely hot, dense matter that is all but invisible to us.
Engaging in something like cosmic accounting, astronomers have tried to balance the scant amount of matter that has been directly observed with the vast amount that remains unobserved directly. The latter constitutes about 90 percent of the universe's matter.
Galaxies, the stars within them, the planet we live on and the chairs we sit on are made up of normal matter — the protons, electrons and neutrons that are collectively called baryons. Baryonic matter can be seen and directly observed, but it makes up only about 4 percent of the universe.
The rest of the universe is split up between dark matter (about 21 percent), a mysterious type of matter that has yet to be identified but that is thought to have played a critical role in the development of the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, and the even more mysterious dark energy (about 75 percent of the universe), which causes the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Dark matter remains a total mystery. But the new study squares the balance sheet a bit in regards to baryonic matter.
Previously, only about half of the baryonic matter in the universe was accounted for by the known gas, stars and galaxies. A team of astrophysicists has now found evidence of part of the missing half in a bridge-like filament connecting two clusters of galaxies. The finding is detailed in the May 2008 issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters.
Along with dark matter, the missing baryonic matter is thought to form an enormous spider web of tendrils that connect galaxy clusters, which sit on threads and knots in the web.
The missing part of this matter was thought to be a hot, ultra-thin gas haze of very low density between larger structures. Its hellacious temperature means that it only emits far-ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.
Some of this missing matter was found by the astrophysicists, who hail from the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and the European Southern Observatory in Germany, as well as the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. The team used the XMM-Newton, an X-ray space observatory, to observe a filament connecting two clusters of galaxies, Abell 222 and Abell 223.
"So far we could only see the clusters, the dense knots of the web. Now we are starting to see the connecting wires of the immense cosmic spider web," said MPE study team member Aurora Simionescu of the discovery of this missing baryonic matter.
A similar baryonic haze, 150 times hotter than the sun's surface, was indirectly detected surrounding the Milky Way and connecting about three dozen other galaxies known collectively as the Local Group in 2003 by astronomers at Harvard and Ohio State Universities.
It is thought that these hot intergalactic hazes were created from material that did not fall into galaxies when they first formed more than 13 billion years ago. Finding and analyzing these filaments could help astronomers better understand what happened after the Big Bang and what forces are dominating the universe today.
Vacuum. No conduction of heat. Think REALLY LARGE Nissan Stainless.
If we’re the brain cells I guess it’s up to us to tell him to take an aspirin and get that edema under control.
bump
For real? I wasn't aware of that.
Also, something seems out of sync: Why is it when I go searching around the web for some information on plasma(s) I find several articles crediting plasma(s) with making up 90+% of the universe, and the authors of this article are still looking??? Looking for something that has already been found? Color me confused!
Seriously, that was a great explanation.
Now here is a sci-fi postulation for space travel. In the future, when we understand the physics better, these "threads" (baryonic not FR) will be the highways between galaxies allowing warp speed travel over light year distances. /wild eyed speculation
from 2001:
“The forces that hold a sponge, a spider web and a brain together in the shape they have are all electromagnetic,” Møller said...
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/spongy_universe_010522-2.html
The Sun is an ELECTRICALLY INERT BODY dontcha know...and you’re an HERETIC LOL!
That’s so pessmistic. These baryonic threads will act like rubber bands snapping everything back to the center. ;^)
Found this in an abstract from a 2001 paper, Baryons in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium :
"The evolution of the WHIM is primarily driven by shock heating from gravitational perturbations breaking on mildly nonlinear, nonequilibrium structures such as filaments. Supernova feedback energy and radiative cooling play lesser roles in its evolution."
Based on the wikipedia entry for Intergalactic Space, I think the shock heating refers to the particles "falling" into these zones and gaining gravitational energy. This energy becomes thermal as they interact. This is a very thin plasma, and the interactions occur when the charged particles pass very near each other and emit "brehmstrahlung" X-rays . Brehmstrahlung means "braking radiation" and is a result of the electrostatic interaction of the particles.
Anyway, they're saying that the radiation is weak enough so that it is not a significant drain of the energy of the WHIM. The abstract of the article from the news link says the thermal energy is of the same order as the detected X-rays, so this means that the interaction time per particle must be much greater than 1 billion years, I believe.
Heaven's net casts wide. Though its meshes are coarse, nothing slips through. - LAO-TSU
( on the fly-leaf of Timothy Ferris's GALAXIES )
Probably, but I've been called worse ;^)
But really, the articles I ran across stated matter-of-factly that plasma makes up most of the universe. It's not like they were trying to sell anything or looking for grant money....or so it would seem. Maybe I need to be sent to re-education camp???
And leptons?
Astronomer’s Dogma.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050523halleyborrelly.htm
“Though the popular theories have hardened into dogma and the scientific media present them as facts, the new discoveries challenge the popular assumptions. The metaphor of a “dirty snowball” does not fit what we know about comets in the space age. A vast library of data now contradicts the standard assumption of an electrically neutral comet in an electrically neutral solar system. It is no longer useful to ignore the electrical properties of plasma...
“electrically neutral solar system”...a la Newton. The same dogma V was up against.
Good question. Most mainstream cosmologists consider plasmas to be merely hot gasses... without electrical charge or flow. They fail to recognize that electrons flow through plasmas both in the laboratory and at the galactic level. According to the Electric Universe theorists, it is the flow of electrons in the plasma and the electromagnetism created by the flows that cause the millions of degrees of heat.
Plasma and electrical discharge phenomena are scalable from the micro to the macro. What we see in the plasma lab is duplicated in the space between stars and planets.
Plasmas do strange things over intersteller distances that are contrarian to gravitic theory. Check out Herbig Haro objects where spiral plasmas hold together in a columnar shape for upwards of 20 light years away from the originating star.
"Explanation: Some features of HH-34 are understood -- some are not. At the core of Herbig-Haro 34 lies a seemingly typical young star. This star, though, somehow ejects energetic "bullets" of high-energy particles, appearing as red streaks toward the lower right of the this image. Astronomers speculate that a burst of these particles might rebound when gas from a disk surrounding the star momentarily collapses onto the star. Visible near the end of each light-year long jet is a glowing cap. HH-34 lies about 1500 light-years away in the Orion Nebula star-forming region. The cause of the large arc of gas on the upper left known as the waterfall remains unexplained." - Nasa
If you magnify the red "jet" of "particle bullets" in HH-34, you can see the vague shape of a double spriral which plasma/electrical universe cosmologists tell us are paired Birkeland currents where electrons are flowing in opposite directions in a double sheath that keeps the "jet" cohesive over light years' distances.
Until astronomers start to recognize that currents flow throughout space, they will be at a loss to understand what they keep being surprised at finding.
Now they have found a surprising, filamental, hot, "gaseous" connection between Galaxies... spanning millions of light years. . . and cannot understand what holds the filaments together over such tremendous distances.
With the increasing population on our planet would require more socks for the population, resulting in increased “Lost sock” occurrences. Perhaps once the sock has reached its final cycle it is transformed into said dark energy, hence for the “accelerated expansion of the universe”.
AND it's never one of those socks that the elastic is getting weak around the top or the toe and heel are starting to wear...
It's all part of a vast cosmic conspiracy.
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