Missing matter found

17 Jun 2002

For years, scientists have been unable to account for all of the material they believe would have been needed to form the cosmos billions of years ago. But now two Johns Hopkins astrophysicists may have found much of the "missing matter" by using a new method to study the early universe. Their new analytical method is detailed in a paper published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.

"I have been very excited about this recent work," said David Schramm, a University of Chicago astrophysicist involved in similar research. "A long-standing problem in cosmology is, `Where is all the normal matter?' Stars and galaxies do not add up to as much normal matter as we feel must be there from our analyses of nuclear processes that took place in the early universe. "The researchers appear to have found the normal matter out between the galaxies. Furthermore, the amount they find is completely consistent with the amount we expected to be there from our nuclear physics arguments, so the whole picture holds together remarkably well," Schramm said.