🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: After decades of coming up short, scientists have finally discovered it hiding in plain sight.
When Colin Hill found himself bored on winter break from Princeton University in late 2013, he decided to search through old cosmology papers. He saw one that sparked an idea: Now that telescopes are so sensitive, could we learn anything new about missing matter by comparing the latest maps of galaxies with traditional records of the universe’s oldest light?
“There’s a huge disconnect,” says Argonne National Laboratory cosmologist Lindsey Bleem. “We’re missing about 30 percent of the [normal matter] we know should be there when we do this accounting.” But the all-sky maps that chart the CMB also contain details of everything the light passed on its way to our telescopes. The gravitational pull from massive clumps of matter can yank on the light’s path, and the hot gas floating between galaxies in clusters can donate a bit of energy to the light. Moving gas can also impart some of its own momentum to the light particles passing through as microwaves, literally shoving around the CMB.
Once cosmologists have the kSZ signal, they can finally determine how much matter is out there — as long as they also know its velocity. Normally that’s no problem, as astronomers can study a galaxy’s light to learn how far away it is and how fast it’s moving. But that type of measurement is time-intensive and expensive, and Hill’s team wanted to look at a lot more — ultimately 46 million galaxies.
. "According to the measurement we made, all of the [normal matter] is accounted for in the present-day universe,” Hill says. The kSZ signals, while faint, revealed the long-missing matter had been there all along, too diffuse to make out. Now researchers could finally see it.But tallying that normal matter was just the beginning. “I was both relieved and excited with the results,” says Hill, now at Columbia University.
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