newsflash: most of missing universe found
The universe as we know it is mostly empty, with light years separating most stars and great voids stretching for millions of light years between large galaxies. But there was also a major chunk of the universe missing, a chunk to the tune of 90% which physics said should be there and yet, no telescope could track it down. That is until the ESO’s giant telescope array in the Atacama desert of Chile flexed it’s 8.2 meter mirrors and found the swaths of missing galaxies about 10 billion light years away just by using a different wavelength. The problem was the gas composing the galaxies in question. Instead of just letting the light escape, it was absorbing the emissions for which astronomers look: the Lyman alpha lines generated when electrons shed some energy, emitting ultraviolet light in the process. When the first surveys of galaxies emitting Lyman alpha lines began, they were based on the idea that ionized hydrogen gas from new stars should be shining bright with a certain frequency of ultraviolet light and found that it was indeed the case. For just 10% of the galaxies they saw…
However, giant chunks of the universe don’t just go missing for no good reason, at least not as far as science is concerned. The problem was that survey teams before were looking for a hydrogen transition line between an electron’s second and first quantum states, or as the electrons were essentially grounding themselves. In the successful attempt to find the missing galaxies, astronomers looked for the Hα line, one energetic order higher. The light they observed came from electrons moving from their third energetic state to its second with quantum energies of approximately 1.9 electron volts from a very well studied area of the sky in which a swath of never before seen galaxies would be very obvious. When the sky lit up with galactic archipelagos, it was a pretty safe bet that the missing galaxies weren’t really missing or hidden behind some space-time manifold, but were out in plain sight. All we had to do was look with a different eye…
See: Hayes, M., et. al., (2010). Escape of five per cent of Lyman-α photons from high-redshift star-forming galaxies Nature, 464 (7288), 562-565 DOI: 10.1038/nature08881
So, does that account for the whole 90% missing?
I had the same question as Lucas.
Does that mean we don’t have to resort to dark matter dark energy theories?
Well, the observations in question didn’t find every missing galaxy out there, but they were able to demonstrate that when you look for the Hα line, you’ll see a number of galaxies very close to what was expected by the original Lyman-α surveys. Given the normal distribution of galaxies in the universe, this finding should account for where the missing 90% of the distant cosmos was hiding.
And no, this has nothing to do with dark matter. That’s a completely different subject which was not addressed by the study. We can’t actually see the dark matter, we can only know that it’s there by weighing certain cosmic objects.
Actually, your whole article is misleading, if only in the title. By saying 90% of missing universe found, people will quickly think you’re talking about dark matter, whereas this is something completely different – just an observation of space that before looked empty and now we can see galaxies. Dark matter is a much larger problem than that, as it’s even present in our own galaxy.
I too thought it was about the discovery of what is dark matter. I got all excited for a moment there.
You people are so stupid. You think you’re so great wtih all your fancy science and technology, but really you’re all primitive. Space, a void?!?!? Even looking at the solar images, you can see space is full of debris and dust. The only void here is the mainstream science donkeys that pretend like the stuff they’re talking about is so fascinating. You idiots want to know what you remind me of? You’re like fish that think think air doesn’t exist and that if you break through the surface of the water you’ll fall off the planet. lol
Did they find Planet X ?
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Super Genius: Where can i sign up for your kooky new religion?
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We still need dark matter (or something like it). Dark matter is expected because the gravitational force of the visible material present is any given galaxy is not enough to explain to rotation of its stars and the magnitude of its gravitational lensing.
Does this discovery alter the estimated proportions of “standard” and “dark” matter, or was the “missing” standard matter already fudged into the equations? Likewise, does this mean there’s more “dark energy” than previously surmised, since there’s prospectively more matter for it to be pushing around?
Does this discovery alter the estimated proportions of “standard” and “dark” matter?
Not even in the slightest. It’s still the WMAP measured 4.6% to 23% since just finding a lot of galaxies where you expect them to be doesn’t cancel out any of dark matters’ effects on the cosmos in general. In fact, these galaxies are bound to be riddled with halos of the stuff, as explained in the follow up to this post.
Man a virus believes he is the supreme and only he exists . Yet his value is unequal to a grain of sand when measured in universal math…..leave him be in his belief he is an image ..from a monkey or a fish or an alien,, in truth he is from the ass of a dinosaurs ..that why his is full of shit at times…..
super genius ….lmao, i think not