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Astronomers find ‘missing’ matter
~science~spaceeuropean space agencymysteriestelescopes
www.esa.int Jun 19, 2025Tildes

Summary

From the article:

Clocking in at over 10 million degrees, the filament contains around 10 times the mass of the Milky Way and connects four galaxy clusters: two on one end, two on the other. All are part of the Shapley Supercluster, a collection of more than 8000 galaxies that forms one of the most massive structures in the nearby Universe.

The filament stretches diagonally away from us through the supercluster for 23 million light-years, the equivalent of traversing the Milky Way end to end around 230 times.

Konstantinos and colleagues characterised the filament by combining X-ray observations from XMM-Newton and Suzaku, and digging into optical data from several others.

…

“This research is a great example of collaboration between telescopes, and creates a new benchmark for how to spot the light coming from the faint filaments of the cosmic web,” adds Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist.

“More fundamentally, it reinforces our standard model of the cosmos and validates decades of simulations: it seems that the ‘missing’ matter may truly be lurking in hard-to-see threads woven across the Universe.”

This is not about “dark matter.” It’s about finding evidence of the “ordinary” matter that was missing according to cosmological models.