Even when considering dark matter and dark energy, regular matter is still missing in the Universe. But by using far away radio-wave sources we could track down hard to find cold matter.
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Our Universe has a problem with matter. Or to be more precise, we have a problem finding all the matter that should be in the Universe. The majority of matter in the Universe is made by the still-mysterious dark matter and dark energy. But that's not the whole problem. According to our best models about half of the common matter that should make out galaxies, stars, planets, and even cosmic dust and gas are still missing.
Yuanming Wang from the University of Sydney with her coworkers developed a new method that could allow us to track down the missing and so far undetectable galactic matter. And this matter could be a substantial portion of all the missing common matter in the Universe.
Wang and her coworkers discovered an unknown cloud/stream of cold galactic gas. It is roughly 10 light-years away from our Solar system. The stream of gas is over 10 billion kilometers wide and roughly 1 trillion kilometers long. Just as a reminder - 1 Astronomical Unit (AU) is roughly 150 million kilometers in length.
As Wang says, this very cold gas cannot be detected by common observation methods as it doesn't radiate much in any way and it is so cold that it usually cannot be detected by radiotelescopes. That's why Wang's tea used an interesting trick. They observed far-away sources of radio-wave radiation in this particular case radio-wave galaxies and studied how their radiation "blinks". They found 5 "blinking" radio-wave sources that create a line in thy. Analysis shows that this "blinking" is created by the radio-waves going through the stream of cold gas.
So far, scientists aren't exactly sure what is the make-up of the gas. But most likely, it is frozen hydrogen "snow". Hydrogen freezes at a temperature of -260° Celsius making clouds of this frozen gas practically undetectable by direct observation even if they aren't that far away from us.
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