Astronomers are helping find elusive atoms across the universe

Astronomers at the University of Toronto have spotted some of the most elusive stuff in our universe by taking a deep look at the Cosmic Web.

Only 10 percent of the atoms in the universe are contained in the galaxies. There is no more than one atom per square foot of space in the form of a gas that is diffuse.

"Because the gas is so thin, it's very hard to see," says an assistant professor cross-appointed to the David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics. Astronomers used to refer to this as the missing baryon problem. When we added up all the glowing matter they could spot, they only found a fraction of the baryons they were expecting.

Astronomers have been finding these atoms for a long time.

The hot gas in a 40 million light year-long filament between two clusters of galaxies was detected by an international team of scientists.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe, was looked at by Hincks and his team using archival data from the Planck satellite.

They determined that the gas in the filament has the mass of 50 billion suns, which is 50 times more mass than our own.

A paper about the research was published earlier this year. Martine Lokken is a student in the astronomy and astrophysics department at the University of Toronto.

Lokken has been uncovering how this gas is distributed in an ensemble of special regions of the universe.

Lokken, who is supervised by Bond and Hloek, used data from the Dark Energy Survey to identify nearly 1,000 galaxy clusters which live in regions of the universe that are likely to be covered by dense gas.

Lokken combined their gas signal from the two data sources. There was evidence for gas in the clusters, but also in patterns that were not in the clusters. There is a lot of diffuse gas that was described in the paper.

Lokken says that their work shows a new way to study gas in the universe. One of the most important tasks that we have to tackle is accounting for all the missing baryons. There are a lot of questions about the origins of our universe that are being probed by our studies of Cosmic gas.

Lokken's work was published in a journal.

More information: M. Lokken et al, Superclustering with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Dark Energy Survey. I. Evidence for Thermal Energy Anisotropy Using Oriented Stacking, The Astrophysical Journal (2022). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac7043

There is a high-resolution view of the gas between Abell 409 and Abell 409 from the observatory.