For decades, scientists have been unable to solve the long-standing puzzle of why we see far less normal matter in galaxies than we should. Now, a team of scientists in the CHIME/FRB Collaboration, led by researchers at MIT, has developed a novel method to spot this missing galactic matter by combining detections of fast radio bursts (FRBs) with measurements of galaxies' locations.
Just after the Big Bang, physicists estimate that roughly 17% of the universe was made from "ordinary" matter — the observable matter that we, the planets, the stars, and galaxies are made of — with the other 83% being dark matter, a mysterious component of the universe that exerts a gravitational influence on objects around it but does not interact with light, leaving it poorly understood.
It has long been theorized that if the missing matter is really present in the universe, it is likely hiding in the vast space between galaxies. However, if this were true, the missing matter would be spread so thinly across empty space that it would be extremely difficult to detect.
"What makes FRBs good to probe missing matter is that they have a special property," co-author Haochen Wang, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement. "They start out as a very quick flash, and as they pass through matter, they smear out in time. And we can measure that smearing very precisely, which is directly proportional to how much missing matter the FRB passed through."
Smeared signals
The results showed that previously undetected matter was indeed located outside of galaxies and that it formed widely spread clouds that extend farther out than previously predicted. These findings support hypotheses that highly energetic processes, such as black hole jets and exploding stars within galaxies, push matter beyond galactic boundaries, but also suggest that the energies of these violent events must be higher than originally thought to throw them out so far.
RELATED STORIES"A galaxy is maybe a few 100,000 light-years across, and we found missing matter out to about 4 million light years," study co-author Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT, said in the statement. "That’s further than the simulations predict, by quite a bit."
Now that these results have verified that FRBs can indeed be used to search for missing matter, the team expects its method and results to improve in the future, particularly given that CHIME is continuing to detect more FRBs.
"We got it to work for the first time," Masui said, "and will get it to work even more precisely as data gets better."
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