Posted on 08/02/2002 4:41:48 PM PDT by vannrox
Reprinted from ScienceDaily Magazine ...
Source: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
Date Posted: Thursday, August 01, 2002
Web Address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/08/020801080835.htm
"The Chandra observations, together with ultraviolet observations, are a major advance in our understanding of how the universe evolved over the last 10 billion years," said Fabrizio Nicastro, leader of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., and head of one of the teams of scientists involved in the discovery.
Four independent teams of scientists, whose results appear as separate papers in the Astrophysical Journal, used Chandra to detect intergalactic gas with temperatures ranging from 300,000 to 5 million degrees Celsius. This gas forms part of a gigantic system of hot gas and dark matter that defines the cosmic landscape. The gaseous component alone contains more material than all the stars in the universe.
"We had strong suspicions from the Big Bang theory and observations of the early universe that this gas exists in the present era, but like a stealth aircraft it had eluded our detection," said Claude Canizares of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, who along with Taotao Fang, also of MIT, led of one of the teams.
The hot gas detected by Chandra can be used to trace the presence of the more massive dark-matter component. The discovery of the hot gas may eventually enable astronomers to map the distribution of dark matter in the universe and perhaps understand its origin.
Ultraviolet telescopes had detected cooler components of the hot gas system, but because of its high temperatures most of it is detectable only with an extremely sensitive X-ray telescope. The various groups used two techniques to probe the intergalactic gas. One method uses the absorbing effects of the gas on X-rays from distant galaxies.
On their way to Earth, the X-rays from a distant quasar dim as they pass through a cloud of the intergalactic gas. By measuring the amount of dimming due to oxygen and other elements in the cloud, astronomers were able to estimate the temperature, density and mass of the absorbing gas.
Observations of the quasars PKS 2155-304 by the MIT and Harvard-Smithsonian groups, and H1821+643 by a group from Ohio State, Columbus, revealed various parts of the hot gas system. One of these appears to be a filament in which the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are embedded, whereas other detected portions are at distances of a few billion light- years from Earth.
These results confirm earlier work by Joel Bregman and Jimmy Irvin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who flipped the normal procedure, and used the fact that the hot gas is itself a source of X-rays. By observing the absorption of X- rays from the hot gas by a foreground galaxy, they were able to deduce the presence of hot gas behind the galaxy.
"Normally the doctor studies the X-ray shadow produced by your bones to learn about your bones," said Bregman. "In essence, we used the shadow to learn about the X-ray machine."
During the first few billion years of the universe, about 20 percent of the matter came together under the influence of gravity to form groups and clusters of galaxies. Theories predict that most of the remaining normal matter and dark matter formed an immense filamentary web connecting the groups and clusters of galaxies, predicted to be so hot that it would be invisible to optical, infrared and radio telescopes.
"Computer simulations have been telling us for several years that most of the 'missing' gas in the universe should be in hot filaments," said Smita Mathur, leader of the Ohio State team. "Most of those filaments are too faint to see, but it looks like we are finally finding their shadows."
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program, and TRW, Inc., Redondo Beach, Calif., is the prime contractor. The Smithsonian's Chandra X- ray Center controls science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
Images and additional information about this result are available at:
http://chandra.harvard.edu
and
http://chandra.nasa.gov
Also, is it thought that the "hot gas" is still being heated? If so, what's the mechanism and source of energy to heat it?
Thanx...
Well, I addressed that to a certain extent in my first post. Here's what they do know: at a small number of specific sample points in the universe, they can measure the extinction function of x-rays, and find that there is a large amount of non-luminous matter in the universe in that direction. That's it. The statistical behavior and amount of extinction agree with what is predicted for gaseous (correct spelling this time) stream of a certain size, density and composition.
The headline of this story is misleading, and is almost certainly not how the scientists couched it in their publication. They probably said something like, "gaseous streams of a certain description are predicted by theory; we have now tested some of these predictions, and they have passed."
It's only your failing if you don't keep asking about what you don't get. Keep firing away and eventually I'll find the right words!
Because matter is electrically neutral on average. This means that the multipole moments of an electric field will be small up to a very large order. Magnetic fields, on the other hand, can have gigantic dipole fields over large distances, but of course these are not ignored by astronomers.
It seems that we do in any case. You can set limits on the density of baryonic matter (i.e. normal matter, made of protons and neutrons) by looking at the relative abundances of the lightest nuclei (hydrogen, deuterium, helium and lithium). If there are too many baryons (protons and neutrons) around, it becomes impossible to construct a model of Big Bang nucleosynthesis that can be reconciled with the abundances we observe.
(The proposed alternate theory revises Newtonian dynamics so that less force is needed to produce very small accelerations.)
I wouldn't call MOND a theory. It's more of an empirical fit.
Democrats.
Hmm, sounds a little liek the "Alderson tramlines" in Pournelle's CoDominum universe, the one that includes the "Mote in God's Eye", and the "The Gripping Hand"
Which originator of the "fit", who is also the author of the SciAmer. article, admits. Upon reading the article, I wondered about some sort of quantum gravity effect at very low levels of graviation. But that's just idle speculation. I certainly don't have the mathematical background to even attempt to investigate the idea.
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