AsianScientist (May 30, 2011) – A Monash student has made a breakthrough in the field of astrophysics, discovering what has until now been described as the Universe’s ‘missing mass.’
Working within a team at the Monash School of Physics, 22-year-old Amelia Fraser-McKelvie conducted a targeted X-ray search for the matter and within just three months found it – or at least some of it. Her work has been published in the journals Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
She pinpointed the location of the missing mass during a summer scholarship together with two astrophysicists at the School of Physics, Dr. Kevin Pimbblet and Dr. Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway.
Dr. Pimbblet, lecturer in the School of Physics, put the magnitude of the discovery in context by explaining that scientists had been hunting for the Universe’s missing mass for decades.
“It was thought from a theoretical viewpoint that there should be about double the amount of matter in the local Universe compared to what was observed. It was predicted that the majority of this missing mass should be located in large-scale cosmic structures called filaments – a bit like thick shoelaces,” said Pimbblet.
Astrophysicists also predicted that the mass would be low in density, but high in temperature – approximately one million degrees Celsius. This meant that, in theory, the matter should have been observable at X-ray wavelengths. Fraser-McKelvie’s discovery has proved that prediction correct, Pimbblet said.
Fraser-McKelvie said the ‘Eureka moment’ came when Lazendic-Galloway closely examined the data they had collected.
“Using her expert knowledge in the X-ray astronomy field, Jasmina reanalyzed our results to find that we had in fact detected the filaments in our data, where previously we believed we had not,” said Lazendic-Galloway.
X-ray observations provide important information about physical properties of large-scale structures, which can help astrophysicists better understand their true nature. Until now, they had been making deductions based only on numerical models, so the discovery is a huge step forward in determining what amount of mass is actually contained within filaments.
The article can be found at: Fraser-McKelvie A et al. (2011) An estimate of the electron density in filaments of galaxies at z∼ 0.1.
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Source: Monash University.
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