A SIGNIFICATIVE FRACTION OF BARYONS RESIDE IN THE FILAMENTS OF THE COSMIC WEB

(Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Hallman (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Observations of the cosmic microwave background indicate that baryons (protons, neutrons, etc., - the ordinary matter just to understand) occupies only 5% of the total energy content of the Universe (95% is dark matter and dark energy). However in the local universe approximately half of this "ordinary" matter it has never been observed.

A group of astrophysicists
-----
to know more:
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00454)
(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v528/n7580/full/nature16058.html)
----
has experimentally verified that the missing mass (ordinary) does not fill the space homogeneously but it is concentrated in large-scale filamentary structures that make up the so-called cosmic web with temperatures between 10^5 to 10^7 degrees. This gas has been heated up by the cluster's gravitational pull and is now feeding its core. The filamentous structures intersect at the nodes creating a structure that visually recalls the network of neurons of the nervous system.

Comments

A UNIVERSE WITHOUT A CENTER?

Image Credit: Eugenio Bianchi, Carlo Rovelli & Rocky Kolb. According to the standard theories of cosmology, there is no center of the universe. In a conventional explosion, material expand out from a central point and the instinct suggests that with the Big Bang happened something similar. But the Big Bang was not an explosion like that at all: it was an explosion of space, not an explosion in space . The Big Bang happened everywhere in the Universe.

A Sapphire Super-Earth

Twenty-one light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia, a planet by the name of HD219134 b orbits its star with a year that is just three days long. With a mass almost five times that of Earth, it is what is known as a super-Earth. Unlike our planet, however, these super-Earths were formed at high temperatures close to their host star and contain high quantities of calcium, aluminum and their oxides – including sapphire and ruby. HD219134 b is one of three candidates likely to belong to a new, exotic class of exoplanets. These objects are completely different from the majority of Earth-like planets. They have 10 to 20 percent lower densities than Earth. Researchers looked at different scenarios to explain the observed densities. For example, a thick atmosphere could lead to a lower overall density. But two of the exoplanets studied, 55 Cancri e and WASP-47 e, orbit their star so closely that their surface temperature is almost 3,000 degrees and they would have lost this ...

SpaceTime

Search This Blog