it was right under our noses all along.

For years, astronomers knew something wasn’t adding up. When they added up all the ordinary matter — the atoms that make stars, planets, and people — they kept coming up short. About 40% of it was missing. Not dark matter, not dark energy — just regular matter that somehow vanished.

Turns out, it wasn’t missing. It was just hiding — spread out as thin, hot gas between galaxies, invisible to traditional telescopes.

So how did scientists spot it?

They used something called Fast Radio Bursts — short, intense flashes of radio waves from deep space. As these bursts travel through the universe, they slow down ever so slightly when passing through matter. By measuring that delay, researchers figured out just how much stuff was in their path. And boom — the numbers lined up.

To double-check, another team used X-ray space telescopes to look at a massive structure called the Shapley Supercluster. They found a giant thread of hot gas stretching 23 million light-years — exactly the kind of structure simulations had predicted decades ago.

So, yes — the models were right all along. We just needed the right tools to prove it.

This discovery doesn’t just solve a cosmic mystery — it helps us better understand how the universe formed, how galaxies evolved, and how everything fits together.

📖 Source:

Connor, L., Ravi, V., Sharma, K. et al. (2025). A gas-rich cosmic web revealed by the partitioning of the missing baryons. Nature Astronomy

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