Category: Dark Matter

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered two huge intergalactic clouds of diffuse hot gas. These clouds are the best evidence yet that a vast cosmic web of hot gas contains the long-sought missing matter – about half of the atoms and ions in the Universe.

Various measurements give a good estimate of the mass-density of the baryons – the neutrons and protons that make up the nuclei of atoms and ions – in the Universe 10 billion years ago. However, sometime during the last 10 billion years a large fraction of the baryons, commonly referred to as “ordinary matter” to distinguish them from dark matter and dark energy, have gone missing.

“An inventory of all the baryons in stars and gas inside and outside of galaxies accounts for just over half the baryons that existed shortly after the Big Bang,” explained Fabrizio Nicastro of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and lead author of a paper in the 3 February 2005 issue of Nature describing the recent research. “Now we have found the likely hiding place of the missing baryons.”

Nicastro and colleagues did not just stumble upon the missing baryons – they went looking for them. Computer simulations of the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters indicated that the missing baryons might be contained in an extremely diffuse web-like system of gas clouds from which galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed.

These clouds have defied detection because of their predicted temperature range of a few hundred thousand to a million degrees Celsius, and their extremely low density. Evidence for this warm-hot intergalactic matter (WHIM) had been detected around our Galaxy, or in the Local Group of galaxies, but the lack of definitive evidence for WHIM outside our immediate cosmic neighborhood made any estimates of the universal mass-density of baryons unreliable.

The discovery of much more distant clouds came when the team took advantage of the historic X-ray brightening of the quasar-like galaxy Mkn 421 that began in October of 2002. Two Chandra observations of Mkn 421 in October 2002 and July 2003, yielded excellent quality X-ray spectral data. These data showed that two separate clouds of hot gas at distances from Earth of 150 million light years and 370 million light years were filtering out, or absorbing X-rays from Mkn 421.

The X-ray data show that ions of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and neon are present, and that the temperatures of the clouds are about 1 million degrees Celsius. Combining these data with observations at ultraviolet wavelengths enabled the team to estimate the thickness (about 2 million light years) and mass density of the clouds.

Assuming that the size and distribution of the clouds are representative, Nicastro and colleagues could make the first reliable estimate of average mass density of baryons in such clouds throughout the Universe. They found that it is consistent with the mass density of the missing baryons.

Mkn 421 was observed three times with Chandra’s Low-Energy Transmission Grating (LETG), twice in conjunction with the High Resolution Camera (May 2000 and July 2003) and once with the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (October 2002). The distance to Mkn 421 is 400 million light years.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington. Northrop Grumman of Redondo Beach, Calif., formerly TRW, Inc., was the prime development contractor for the observatory. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.

Additional information and images are available at: http://chandra.harvard.edu and http://chandra.nasa.gov

Original Source: Chandra News Release

Dark matter continues to confound astronomers, as NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory demonstrated with the detection of an extensive envelope of dark matter around an isolated elliptical galaxy. This discovery conflicts with optical data that suggest a dearth of dark matter around similar galaxies, and raises questions about how galaxies acquire and keep such dark matter halos.

The observed galaxy, known as NGC 4555, is unusual in that it is a fairly large, elliptical galaxy that is not part of a group or cluster of galaxies. In a paper to be published in the November 1, 2004 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Ewan O’Sullivan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA and Trevor Ponman of the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, use the Chandra data to show that the galaxy is embedded in a cloud of 10-million-degree-Celsius gas.

This hot gas cloud has a diameter of about 400,000 light years, about twice that of the visible galaxy. An enormous envelope, or halo, of dark matter is needed to confine the hot cloud to the galaxy. The total mass of the dark matter halo is about ten times the combined mass of the stars in the galaxy, and 300 times the mass of the hot gas cloud.

A growing body of evidence indicates that dark matter – which interacts with itself and “normal” matter only through gravity – is the dominant form of matter in the universe. According to the popular “cold dark matter” theory, dark matter consists of mysterious particles left over from the dense early universe that were moving slowly when galaxies and galaxy clusters began to form.

“The observed properties of NGC 4555 confirm that elliptical galaxies can posses dark matter halos of their own, regardless of their environment,” said O’Sullivan. “This raises an important question: what determines whether elliptical galaxies have dark matter halos?”

Most large elliptical galaxies are found in groups and clusters of galaxies, and are likely the product of the merger of two spiral galaxies. In such an environment, the dark matter halos can be stripped away by gravitational tidal force and added to other galaxies or the group as a whole. Therefore, it is difficult to determine how much dark matter the original galaxies had, and how much they have lost to the group as a whole through interactions with their environment.

The importance of the issue of the intrinsic amount of dark matter associated with an elliptical galaxy has recently increased owing to a report by an international team of astronomers led by Aaron Romanowsky of the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. This team found little, if any evidence of dark matter in three relatively nearby elliptical galaxies. Two of these were in loose galaxy groups, and one was isolated. Their result, based on optical data from the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope on the Spanish island of La Palma, is in clear conflict with the X-ray data on NGC 4555. The optical technique used to search for dark matter in the nearby elliptical galaxies could not be applied to NGC 4555 because it is more than 3 times as far away from Earth.

Either the galaxies observed by Romanowsky and colleagues have lost their dark matter halos through earlier interactions with other galaxies, or their dark matter halos are much more extended, or they formed without dark matter halos. The first option is possible for the galaxies in groups, but very unlikely for the isolated galaxy. The second and third options are still open, but would require a modification – perhaps a major modification – of the cold dark matter theory of galaxy formation.

“This is clearly a question which deserves further consideration,” said O’Sullivan. “It seems likely that much more theoretical and observational work on elliptical galaxies will be required before this issue can be resolved.”

Chandra observed NGC 4555 with its Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) in February 2003. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington. Northrop Grumman of Redondo Beach, Calif., formerly TRW, Inc., was the prime development contractor for the observatory. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.

Additional information and images are available at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu
and
http://chandra.nasa.gov

Original Source: Chandra News Release