{"id":211390,"date":"2025-04-14T13:12:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-14T18:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/half-of-the-universes-hydrogen-gas-long-unaccounted-for-has-been-found"},"modified":"2025-04-14T13:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-14T18:12:30","slug":"half-of-the-universes-hydrogen-gas-long-unaccounted-for-has-been-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/half-of-the-universes-hydrogen-gas-long-unaccounted-for-has-been-found","title":{"rendered":"Half of the universe\u2019s hydrogen gas, long unaccounted for, has been found"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/half-of-the-universes-hydrogen-gas-long-unaccounted-for-has-been-found3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers tallying up all the normal matter\u2014stars, galaxies and gas\u2014in the universe today have come up embarrassingly short of the total matter produced in the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. In fact, more than half of normal matter\u2014half of the 15% of the universe\u2019s matter that is not dark matter\u2014cannot be accounted for in the glowing stars and gas we see.<\/p>\n<p>New measurements, however, seem to have found this missing matter in the form of very diffuse and invisible ionized hydrogen gas, which forms a halo around galaxies and is more puffed out and extensive than astronomers thought.<\/p>\n<p>The findings not only relieve a conflict between astronomical observations and the best, proven model of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, they also suggest that the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies are more active than previously thought, fountaining gas much farther from the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/galactic+center\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">galactic center<\/a> than expected\u2014about five times farther, the team found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers tallying up all the normal matter\u2014stars, galaxies and gas\u2014in the universe today have come up embarrassingly short of the total matter produced in the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. In fact, more than half of normal matter\u2014half of the 15% of the universe\u2019s matter that is not dark matter\u2014cannot be accounted for in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}