Ten years ago, scientists predicted about half of the missing "ordinary" or normal matter made of atoms exists in the form of low density gas, filling vast spaces between galaxies.
But attempts to detect it in the past were hampered.
Now, an international team has discovered its hottest parts, using the European Space Agency's orbiting observatory.
They were observing a pair of galaxy clusters -- Abell 222 and Abell 223 -- situated at a distance of 2,300 million light years from Earth, when images and spectra of the system revealed a bridge of hot gas connecting them, the ESA said.
"The hot gas that we see in this bridge or filament is probably the hottest and densest part of the diffuse gas in the cosmic web, believed to constitute about half the baryonic matter in the universe," said team leader Norbert Werner of SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.
Added team member Alexis Finoguenov: "The discovery of the warmest of the missing baryons is important. That's because various models exist and they all predict that the missing baryons are some form of warm gas, but the models tend to disagree about the extremes."
Source: By DDNEWS
