You may have already guessed that there’s a lot of matter in the Universe. Each of us is living proof that there’s matter in nature, some more than others. As why this matter exists in the first place is still pretty much a mystery; scientists still learn a lot about chemical elements and their way of acting.
By studying and mapping a galactic wind using the Very Large Telescope at the ESO, an international team of scientists located part of the Universe’s missing matter, according to Phys.org.
How can we define galactic winds
Surely not everyone is an expert in astrophysics. Galactic winds are streams of high-speed charged particles that often blow out of galaxies. In other words, galaxies can exchange matter with the outer environment through the galactic winds.
The team of scientists contained researchers from l’Université Claude Bernard Lyon and the CNRS, and they generated a map of the galactic wind as it was driving exchanges between a nebula and a young galaxy formation.
For many centuries, scientists considered that there were only three states of matter: liquid, solid, and gas. But it turns out that there are actually five states of matter. Except for the afore-mentioned trio, we have plasma and the man-made Bose-Einstein condensates.
Most physicists agree that matter was born due to the Big Bang event that occurred 13.7 billion years ago. Obviously, something resulting without a cause apparently defies both science and common sense, but some scientists actually believe that the singularity that led to the Big Bang came from absolutely nothing. One of those scientists is the great physicist Stephen Hawking. He explained that there’s no use asking what existed before the Big Bang since time itself didn’t exist. Therefore, there wasn’t time for anything to exist before the Big Bang.
The new study about the discovery of the missing matter was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
