Back in 2019, NASA published this:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chan ... -mass.html
Here’s the 2020 paper associated with the above article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04625.pdf .Where is the Universe Hiding its Missing Mass?
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/file ... e/whim.jpg
New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped solve the Universe's "missing mass" problem, as reported in our latest press release. Astronomers cannot account for about a third of the normal matter — that is, hydrogen, helium, and other elements — that were created in the first billion years or so after the Big Bang.
Scientists have proposed that the missing mass could be hidden in gigantic strands or filaments of warm (temperature less than 100,000 Kelvin) and hot (temperature greater than 100,000 K) gas in intergalactic space. These filaments are known by astronomers as the "warm-hot intergalactic medium" or WHIM. They are invisible to optical light telescopes, but some of the warm gas in filaments has been detected in ultraviolet light. … snip …
If these filaments exist, they could absorb certain types of light such as X-rays that pass through them. The inset in this graphic represents some of the X-ray data collected by Chandra from a distant, rapidly-growing supermassive black hole known as a quasar. The plot is a spectrum — the amount of X-rays over a range of wavelengths — from a new study of the quasar H1821+643 that is located about 3.4 billion light years from Earth.
The latest result uses a new technique that both hones the search for the WHIM carefully and boosts the relatively weak absorption signature by combining different parts of the spectrum to find a valid signal. With this technique, researchers identified 17 possible filaments lying between the quasar and Earth, and obtained their distances.
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Indeed, the team did not find absorption in the individual spectra. But by adding them together, they turned a 5.5-day-long observation into the equivalent of almost 100 days' worth (about 8 million seconds) of data. This revealed an absorption line from oxygen expected to be present in a gas with a temperature of about one million Kelvin.
By extrapolating from these observations of oxygen to the full set of elements, and from the observed region to the local Universe, the researchers report they can account for the complete amount of missing matter.
Now, notice ... there's not one mention of the the word "plasma" in that article.
Now they’ve published this …
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-nasa-chan ... ision.html
Again, not one mention of "plasma". Just "gas, gas, gas". And I think it’s shocking that any article provided by NASA or the Chandra X-ray Center would use the word “gas” when they should be using plasma. Apparently they don’t know that the distinction is important. Or they're trying to hide the fact it's plasma. But in any case, it’s pretty clear that the intergalactic medium is indeed filled with plasma. Now if they'd only ask themselves what the implications of that really are …. BUT THEY WON’T.NASA's Chandra finds galaxy cluster collision on a 'WHIM'
Although scientists know a great deal about the composition of the universe, there has been a vexing problem they have struggled to explain—there is a significant amount of matter that has not yet been accounted for.
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Scientists have proposed that at least some of this missing mass could be hidden in gigantic strands, or filaments, of warm to hot (temperatures of 10,000 to 10,000,000 kelvins) gas in the space in between galaxies and clusters of galaxies. They have dubbed this the "warm-hot intergalactic medium," or WHIM.
A team of astronomers using Chandra to observe a system of colliding galaxy clusters has likely found evidence of this WHIM residing in the space between them.
"Finding these filaments of missing matter has proven to be exceptionally difficult, and only a few examples are known," said Arnab Sarkar of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led this study. "We are excited that we have likely pinpointed another."
The researchers used Chandra to study Abell 98, which contains colliding galaxy clusters about 1.4 billion light-years from Earth. The Chandra data reveals a bridge of X-ray emission between two of the colliding clusters containing gas at a temperature of about 20 million kelvins and cooler gas with a temperature of about 10 million kelvins. The hotter gas in the bridge is likely from gas in the two clusters overlapping with each other. The temperature and density of the cooler gas agree with predictions for the hottest and densest gas in the WHIM.