Astronomers Lose Universe
By Mark Steer
Astronomers have announced that they've 'mislaid' as much as ten to twenty percent of the mass of the Universe. We all know that academics can be a bit scatty, but the cruel irony of this story is that only careful research led to such a careless blunder.The team of astronomers from the University of Utah have found that X-rays produced by massive clouds of hot interstellar gas - only found in 2002 - aren't produced by these big, hot clouds afterall, but by lightweight electrons. The problem is that the only way we knew gas clouds existed was because they produced X-rays. And if the X-rays are being produced by something else instead... no clouds. No clouds means no extra mass. No extra mass means that there's yet another big chunk of the Universe gone missing.
But how can bits of the Universe be missing? Based on observations and calculations about gravitational forces and speed with which the universe is expanding, physicists and astronomers have worked out that there must be an awful of mass out in the universe that we just can't detect. The finding in 2002 seemed to account for about twenty percent of the mass we were missing. This new research, however, means that we have to say goodbye to at least some of the hot gas and assign the missing mass back to such things as dark matter.Get more from the Null:
- How it works - Dark matter
- Interesting - Top ten things science can't explain
- Funny - Astronomers discover the galactic sandwich
- Oh I see - The truth behind black holes
Image: Sachin Ghodke
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