Aussie student finds universe's 'missing mass'

[JonLP24]

SYDNEY (AFP) – A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break.

Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University's School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".

Monash astrophysicist Dr Kevin Pimbblet explained that scientists had previously detected matter that was present in the early history of the universe but that could not now be located.

"There is missing mass, ordinary mass not dark mass ... It's missing to the present day," Pimbblet told AFP.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110527/sc_afp/australiaastrophysicsscience

[n2doc]

1. I thought she was going to tell us where Limbaugh was vacationing n/t

[xchrom]

2. congratulations ms fraser-mckelvie.

[Poll_Blind]

3. Really, it just sounds like another hypothesis and possibly a bid to get a telescope built which...

...can specifically check those filaments in order to "prove" to some general satisfaction that the hypothesis is correct.

But I don't see a proof there. If there is a proof of sorts, the journalist who filed the story should be denied a fine lunch while they rewrite to include the relevant information.

PB

[TheMadMonk]

6. Very repbulican attitude there. No benefit to you. No worth. /nt

[sofa king]

7. No, the poster is distinguishing between "hypothesis" and "theory."

The grad student has hypothesized that this is where the missing mass may be, and (hopefully), backed it up with some scholarship that the journalist failed to pass on.

A hypothesis is only the first step on the way to a theory using the scientific method. In the case of astronomy and cosmology, the hypothesis is then verified through observation, since we cannot perform galactic-scale experiments.

Neither a hypothesis nor a theory is "proof."

[montanto]

4. *cough* cough*bullshit*cough*cough

I don't see any proof. I see a hypothesis. If the matter is, as the article says, low density but high temperature, then its baryons and its already accounted for. The theory would have to account for something like 80% more non-baryonic matter than we have already seen. If these hot filaments, constituting the 80% of matter unaccounted for are stretched out between galaxies, then there are no galaxies; If they are in the galaxies, they are incorporated in the numbers already known, and there are no filaments.

[DetlefK]

5. As a doctoral(!) astrophysicist he should know that hot mass smears out.

That's one of the basics when discussing structural formations in our universe:
Cold matter is kept in its place by gravity, whereas hot matter smears out to diffuse nebulas.

And where did Amelia point her antenna for the X-ray measurements? Were there neutron stars or galactic centers among the measured sectors?
What energies did she measure?

And if she was looking for ordinary mass, why wasn't she looking for the typical 21cm (1420 MHz)-radiation of atomic hydrogen?

And for the doctor: If you include this mass-distribution into your GALPROP-simulations, do they still match other measurements?