A Quick Look at Where is the Universe Hiding its Missing Mass?

The Universe has a problem — or at least the astronomers who study it do.

Scientists cannot account for about a third of the "normal" matter that they think was created shortly after the Big Bang.

Normal matter includes hydrogen, helium, and other elements that make up everything from planets to stars to galaxies (but not dark matter).

One place this "missing mass" might have ended up is giant strands of superheated gas known by astronomers as the WHIM.

A team of researchers has used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to look for signatures of the WHIM in X-rays from a distant quasar.

Their work, which uses a new technique, suggests that they have found evidence for multiple pieces of the WHIM.

If this result is confirmed by other observations, a long-standing mystery in astrophysics could be finally solved.

[TheReaverOfDarkness]

Chandra Team: Can you give us a report on what happened after Chandra went into safe mode? Still worried, and curious.