Nicastro Fabrizio, Mathur Smita, Elvis Martin
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Science. 2008 Jan 4;319(5859):55-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1151400.
Stars and gas in galaxies, hot intracluster medium, and intergalactic photo-ionized gas make up at most half of the baryons that are expected to be present in the universe. The majority of baryons are still missing and are expected to be hidden in a web of warm-hot intergalactic medium. This matter was shock-heated during the collapse of density perturbations that led to the formation of the relaxed structures that we see today. Finding the missing baryons and thereby producing a complete inventory of possibly the only detectable component of the energy-mass budget of the universe is crucial to validate or invalidate our standard cosmological model.
星系中的恒星和气体、星系团内的热介质以及星系间的光致电离气体，最多只占宇宙中预计存在的重子的一半。大多数重子仍然缺失，预计隐藏在温热的星系间介质网络中。这些物质在密度扰动坍缩过程中被激波加热，而密度扰动坍缩导致了我们今天看到的松弛结构的形成。找到缺失的重子，从而完整列出宇宙能量-质量预算中可能是唯一可探测的组成部分，对于验证或推翻我们的标准宇宙学模型至关重要。
