Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; Spectrum: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/T. Fang et al.
Posted on 05/11/2010 7:25:05 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Scientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist's impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue. 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 X-ray emission from WHIM in this wall is too faint to be detected, so instead a search was made for absorption of light from a bright background source by the WHIM, using deep observations with Chandra and XMM. This background source is a rapidly growing supermassive black hole located far beyond the wall at a distance of about two billion light years. This is shown in the illustration as a star-like source, with light traveling through the Sculptor Wall towards the Earth. The relative location of the background source, the Sculptor Wall, and the Milky Way galaxy are shown in a separate plot, where the view instead looks down on the source and the Wall from above.
An X-ray spectrum of the background source is given in the inset, where the yellow points show the Chandra data and the red line shows the best model for the spectrum after including all of the Chandra and XMM data. The dip in X-rays towards the right side of the spectrum corresponds to absorption by oxygen atoms in the WHIM contained in the Sculptor Wall. The characteristics of the absorption are consistent with the distance of the Sculptor Wall as well as the predicted temperature and density of the WHIM. This result gives scientists confidence that the WHIM will also be found in other large-scale structures.
This result supports predictions that about half of the normal matter in the local Universe is found in a web of hot, diffuse gas composed of the WHIM. Normal matter — which is different from dark matter -- is composed of the particles, such as protons and electrons, that are found on the Earth, in stars, gas, and so on. A variety of measurements have provided a good estimate of the amount of this "normal matter" present when the Universe was only a few billion years old. However, an inventory of the nearby Universe has turned up only about half as much normal matter, an embarrassingly large shortfall.
* This matter is made up of hot diffuse gas, which is known as WHIM (warm-hot intergalactic medium).
* To get this result, researchers analyzed X-ray light from a distant quasar that passed through a "wall" of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth.
Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; Spectrum: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/T. Fang et al.
fill it to the brim .. with WHIM
“...which is known as WHIM (warm-hot intergalactic medium).”
Somebody call Al Gore!
We have “GALACTIC WARMING”!!!!
NOW WILL WE FINALLY STOP DRIVING OUR SUVs ?!?!?!?!!!?!?
Both the distances and timespans involved here are difficult to grasp.
Norm, have you by chance seen one of the latest editions of the National Geographic Atlas of the World? They now include not only detailed topographical maps of the earth and all we know about the known planets, but also a three dimensional model of known space out to millions of light years away.
The distances involved here are so vast that the entire Universe could have blown up a million years ago, and the blast front won’t even reach us for another few million years, but when the light from the explosion finally reaches us it will be far too late to do anything about it....
"Dark Matter" comes in two varieties: ordinary matter ("baryonic" dark matter) which simply isn't reflecting or emitting light and "non-baryonic" dark matter which is a weird theoretical form which doesn't interact with light yet still exerts a gravitational influence.
There are two kinds of “stuff” in the Universe: Matter, and Doesn’t Matter. The vast majority of stuff in the universe is composed of the latter..
I love perspective.
The thought of exploring just our own galaxy is mind boggling. Yet our own galaxy is around 100K light-years in diameter housing 200 billion or more stars...is only a grain of sand on the beach compared to the universe as a whole.
Sooooo, Dark Matter has to be the Doesn't Matter since it can't be the Matter making it also the Latter Matter in your statement.
You must be a "Fizzassist" to have figured all that out ;^)
We didn't learn last time either, when all of our SUV's melted the glaciers.
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*** The thought of exploring just our own galaxy is mind boggling. Yet our own galaxy is around 100K light-years in diameter housing 200 billion or more stars...is only a grain of sand on the beach compared to the universe as a whole. ***
As Carl Sagan said in one episode of Cosmos...
There are more stars in our universe than all the grains of sand on every beach on our world.Now the mental image of that number was truly mind boggling when I first heard it.
So lately - after seeing re-runs on the Science Channel - when I here about our money being spent with 'Billions here' and 'Trillions there' I mentally put it into Astronomical terms, like distances.
And then I conclude -- We're really screwed.
Good way to think about it. At this point paying off the debt would be like flying to Andromeda at only light speed.
These hot gas plasma filaments stretch over 400 million light years from blazar H2356-309. The sight line intercepts the sculptor wall, which essentially is the same structure indirectly observed as a dark matter gravity tidal streaming line that satellite galaxies merge together into parent galaxies. It is “warm hot” because its 1 million degrees at the x-ray region where practically all the believed missing visible matter exists. Line width of 28.5 +- 10.5 m A* . O VII column density lower limit is 0.8 x 10^16 cm^-2. Baryon over-density of ~30 for the WHIM. QUESTION: why can’t these plasma filaments be quantum electric fields where gravity is not from invisible dark matter galaxy halos, but from electricity! They connect together millions of galaxies and by warping space with electrical charges the distances are at the square to their masses. Planet jupiters orbit closely resembles the great 147 day sunspot cycle, and plasma magnetic field lines of thin transparent plasma at a million degress can warp space and keep planets in orbits!
quantum gravity and black holes are related to this new discovery. Everyone should abandon the dark matter and dark energy scam ! IT has cost much wasted taxpayer dollars.
www.quantauniverse.com
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