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    Half of the universe's hydrogen gas, long unaccounted for, has been found
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    Half of the universe’s hydrogen gas, long unaccounted for, has been found

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    8 Comments

    1. moreesq on

      If there is so much more ionized hydrogen than had been thought, doesn’t that throw off all calculations of distance to celestial objects that depend on the dispersion measure? There is some known amount of interstellar matter, and that is taken into account in dispersion measures, but this hydrogen would throw all those calculations off, wouldn’t it?

    2. martinbean on

      How does someone come up with how much hydrogen the universe “should” have, and then declares it “missing”?

    3. reincarnatedusername on

      “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” – Frank Zappa

    4. Atosen on

      > In the new paper, the researchers estimated the distribution of ionized hydrogen around galaxies by stacking images of approximately 7 million galaxies—all within about 8 billion light-years of Earth—and measuring the slight dimming or brightening of the cosmic microwave background caused by a scattering of the radiation by electrons in the ionized gas, the so-called kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect.
      >

      > “The cosmic microwave background is in the back of everything we see in the universe. It’s the edge of the observable universe,” Ferraro said. “So you can use that as a backlight to see where the gas is.”

      When described this way, it seems so elegantly simple, doesn’t it?

    6. ThisCaiBot on

      Thank god for this. What the hell was gonna happen? Not enough hydrogen. Dude that sucks

    8. sticky_frog_nipples on

      Yes. It’s in the form of hydrogen sulfide, and was seemingly captured and used to fill a bloated orange oilskin that proceeded to win the United States presidential election.