Universe’s missing matter may be hiding in giant clouds

Two monster cosmic clouds could hold the solution to the mystery of the missing matter —immense amounts of celestial stuff that somehow...

Two monster cosmic clouds could hold the solution to the mystery of the missing matter —immense amounts of celestial stuff that somehow has eluded detection.

The big clouds of hot gas near a distant galaxy are the best evidence yet that a vast cosmic web holds all the ordinary matter that went missing some 10 billion years ago, researchers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory said.

The lost matter could amount to about half of all the ordinary matter in the universe. Ordinary matter accounts for only 5 percent of what cosmologists believe exists. The rest is invisible dark matter and a mysterious force known as dark energy.

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Computer simulations indicate that the missing matter might be hiding in an extremely diffuse web of gas clouds from which galaxies formed. However, these clouds have been hard to spot because of their vast temperature range and their extremely low density. This makes them a very specific sort of stuff known as warm-hot intergalactic matter, or WHIM.

Chandra managed to spot two clouds of WHIM when it observed the galaxy Markarian 421, which is some 400 million light-years away. —Reuters

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Friday, Sept. 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

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