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First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

newscientist.com

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Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former physics student, I see your point but disagree. Apologies for the wall of text about just this one choice of wording, but discussing why science communication is a very difficult trade-off takes a bit of space. One reason to stick to "baryons" is that it is the term used by the researchers in their papers. So it is more true to the research that is being summarised. The start of the article (unlike its ti…

It seems I know just enough to be dangerous. Thank you for your well-written explanation.

You're very welcome, and don't be hard on yourself!

It is easy to underestimate how difficult it is to give good explanations to non-experts, regardless of the topic at hand. I mean, just look at how how much I wrote about the choice of one word.

When writing for non-experts, an expert must imagine what it is like to not know the right answer. Our brains seem to be terrible at that: most people are unable to "not see" the cow in that famous gestalt picture once spotted[0], and I think the same thing applies to many kinds of thinking.

The only way out for an expert seems to be a lot of exposure to "dumb questions" (there is no such thing, of course) from non-experts, to figure out what logic the latter's wrong conclusions are. It doesn't help that there are many more ways to come to perfectly logical but wrong conclusions based on wrong premises, than there are ways to come to the right conclusion with the right premises.

And even once you are aware of these mismatches, you still have to explain yourself in such a way that there is a path from the incorrect interpretation to the more correct interpretation, without getting lost in trying to explain everything.

So no wonder that even professional educators and science writers, who are supposed to be skilled at this, tend to do a poor job!

[0] http://icog.group.shef.ac.uk/what-can-you-see-some-questions...

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If dark matter where a lot of photons, then we could detect it. For example the experiments to detect the cosmic microwave background radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background can detect a very small amount of light that is the leftover of the radiation produced soon after the big bang. We have very good estimations of how many photons are out there.

I don't understand, how would you detect photons that are going in a direction orthogonal to you in intergalactic space? They have to be coming toward you for you to detect them, right?

An implicit assumption is that the universe is isotropic and homogenous at that scale. Meaning, it looks the same from any point and any direction.

So you might not detect photons in one particular direction, but we should assume that they should be going in all directions. Otherwise that theory is just moving the goal from "where's this energy" to "why is it pointing towards that".

CMB is consistent with, every direction is the same, so you would have to say "photons are going everywhere in this range, but towards that in this segment of the spectrum".

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you have a meter-stick. It has uniform graduation markings to show you centimeters and millimeters. Now imagine that it is getting longer. No matter how hard you look at it, the stick is still one meter long. That's what the markings on it say, anyway. It's actually getting longer at the same rate as all the other meter-sticks. That's the expansion of the universe. Now imagine you balanced two marbles on the…

> At least, that's how I understand it. I could be wrong. General Relativity deals in spacetime, but it is often convenient to slice spacetime into spacelike volumes in which every point in the volume ("the spacelike hypersurface") is at the same timelike coordinate. One important consideration is that no timelike axis is any more preferred by nature than any other, and one can always find an observer who disagrees w…

Can you please give any usable link for this:

> What does not match observation extremely well is naive quintessence models where the metric expansion works within galaxies and is simply checked by the gravitational interactions of the matter within them

Or write some additional details about it. I know that the "popular" explanations claim that "everything" expands, and I understood from your reply that what we see can be technically modeled in equations as if there's nothing that expands inside of whole galaxies, but what is the actual proof that there are actually no expansion forces inside of the galaxies at all? Thanks in advance.

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#114
post #11

> At the largest size, Google image search tells me that it looks exactly like foam rubber. Foam rubber is created by combining a chemical agent that glomps together through the wonder of polymerization with another chemical agent that delivers lots of gas bubbles to make space between the polymers. Universes are created by rapidly expanding a superdense plasma that glomps together through the wonders of gravity, whi…

OK, I should have pointed to observations which demonstrate that what we can see of the universe does indeed look like foam, at the level of galaxy clusters and superclusters. I'll do it later, if anyone expresses interest.

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#115
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, not only did they find some of the missing matter, they found some of the missing energy, too. Nope, this has nothing to do with dark energy. > This does, however, screw some of the more classical cosmologists. Not sure who you're referring to. These results are completely consistent with the standard model of cosmology.

> Not sure who you're referring to. These results are completely consistent with the standard model of cosmology. Not if what is being detected is simply mass associated with filamentary currents of energy (with attendant magnetic fields) rather than particular particles.

They're modelling filaments as cylindrical tubes of hot electrons connecting pairs of galaxies. I don't know what you mean by "mass associated with filamentary currents of energy", but while the electrons are hot (~million Kelvin), they're non-relativistic and their kinetic energy is negligible.

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, how would you detect photons that are going in a direction orthogonal to you in intergalactic space? They have to be coming toward you for you to detect them, right?

An implicit assumption is that the universe is isotropic and homogenous at that scale. Meaning, it looks the same from any point and any direction. So you might not detect photons in one particular direction, but we should assume that they should be going in all directions. Otherwise that theory is just moving the goal from "where's this energy" to "why is it pointing towards that". CMB is consistent with, every dire…

But isn't it a hell of a lot less of a stretch to imagine there are more photons in other parts of the universe than here, than to imagine there is some sort of mysterious dark matter permeating all of the universe? If we're going to be unable to interact with whatever dark matter is to test may hypothesis, we might as well propose the hypothesis that requires the least radical changes to our fundamental theories of physics, no?

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#117

"made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter" That's clumsily worded, as it makes it sound like it's still something exotic. _We're_ made of baryons: this is just normal matter.

As a former physics student, I see your point but disagree. Apologies for the wall of text about just this one choice of wording, but discussing why science communication is a very difficult trade-off takes a bit of space. One reason to stick to "baryons" is that it is the term used by the researchers in their papers. So it is more true to the research that is being summarised. The start of the article (unlike its ti…

Funnily enough, cosmology's use of "baryon" predates the Standard model (it even predates Politzer, Gross & Wilczek 1973) and leans heavily on the Greek root "barus", meaning heavy i.e. having a significant rest mass (and thus implying "nonrelativistic", more below). Since then we've developed the Standard Model and its baryons have many properties that are essentially irrelevant at cosmological scales after reionization.

More technically (and all to the first order), in \Lambda-CDM the first Friedmann equation can be written as H(a) \equiv H_0 {\sqrt {(\Omega_c + \Omega_b) a^{-3} + (\Omega_{rad+hdm}) a^{-4} + ... }}, the \Omega_{...} being density parameters. Although in this form "c" stands for Cold Dark Matter (CDM) and "b" stands for baryons, the important common attribute here is that the rest mass is high enough that absent highly atypical kicks they move slowly compared to photons[1]. I explicitly added "+hdm" (hot dark matter) to the radiation term, where hdm is mainly relativistic neutrinos, which aren't heavy and thus usually move at speeds closely approaching that of photons.

The relativsitic/nonrelativistic split is important in structure formation, roughly because the former do not stick around during gravitational collapse.

One can consider here that \Omega_c is (still) likely to be mainly nonrelativistic heavy uncharged leptons and that if we lump nonrelativistic charged leptons separately into \Omega_{b+c+l} term they would be a tiny contribution to the density.

Relativistic baryons and relativistic charged leptons could be lumped in with \Omega_{rad}; it wouldn't make much difference. Experimental values for \Omega_{rad} are very small (~ 10^-4 vs \Omega_{b+c} ~ 3 x 10^-1, i.e. about 1:3000) and are often dropped for ease of calculation.

Bound states are either relativistic or not, such things would just take the place of relativistic neutrinos and photons from \Omega_{rad}.

Doing any of this is just fiddling at the margins, however. Cold Dark Matter and nuclei simply dwarf any other matter component across most of the universe's history.

- --

[1] In the FLRW model the components of the \Omega_{...} densities (i.e., matter in the large) are homogeneous, compressible fluids of constant density at rest under a constant spatially isotropic tension in an "equatorial" slicing of the RW spacetime, so we don't even have relativistic baryons (for example): everything is moving inertially as spontaneous symmetry breaking freezes them out of the hotter denser earlier phase closer to the big bang. This is a reasonable approximation at the largest scales.

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#118

Dang I read the first paragraph of the article and immediately went searching for the real papers since I didn't expect any media outlet to include them at the bottom, but here they are for anyone who made the same mistake I did! https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05024 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378 Not a cosmologist but here's my go at the de Graff paper. (Let's get this out of the way, the title is click-bait and the pa…

> https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378

Mmhmm, yes, I know some of these words!

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you have a meter-stick. It has uniform graduation markings to show you centimeters and millimeters. Now imagine that it is getting longer. No matter how hard you look at it, the stick is still one meter long. That's what the markings on it say, anyway. It's actually getting longer at the same rate as all the other meter-sticks. That's the expansion of the universe. Now imagine you balanced two marbles on the…

> At least, that's how I understand it. I could be wrong. General Relativity deals in spacetime, but it is often convenient to slice spacetime into spacelike volumes in which every point in the volume ("the spacelike hypersurface") is at the same timelike coordinate. One important consideration is that no timelike axis is any more preferred by nature than any other, and one can always find an observer who disagrees w…

[deleted]

Re: First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe

#120
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least, that's how I understand it. I could be wrong. General Relativity deals in spacetime, but it is often convenient to slice spacetime into spacelike volumes in which every point in the volume ("the spacelike hypersurface") is at the same timelike coordinate. One important consideration is that no timelike axis is any more preferred by nature than any other, and one can always find an observer who disagrees w…

Can you please give any usable link for this: > What does not match observation extremely well is naive quintessence models where the metric expansion works within galaxies and is simply checked by the gravitational interactions of the matter within them Or write some additional details about it. I know that the "popular" explanations claim that "everything" expands, and I understood from your reply that what we see…

> "usable link"

How much technical detail do you want?

Starting with the "gimme hardcore!" end, I was thinking of how to construct an argument using vierbiens and then how to boil it down to something accessible (or at least representable on LaTeX-free HN), and then remembered that it had already been done by Cooperstock et al.: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9803097 The tl;dr is that if the cosmological expansion induces strain on matter, the strain is too small to be measurable.

Retreating from the hardest of answers, Peter Coles has an old moderate-detail article on this at https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/is-space-expandi... and he refers to both Peacock's and Harrison's textbooks which give greater detail (I recommend the latter if you can get your hands on it at a library).

His approach to the question you're asking ("roughly, does the solar system expand with the universe?") is how I'd go about it too, following on from the comment you replied to. My central point would be that in General Relativity we use exact solutions of the Einstein Field Equations because they're well-understood not because they're accurate. Natural systems don't source e.g the exact Schwarzschild spacetime for several reasons including lack of perfect spherical symmetry, lack of perfect vacuum to infinity outside the source, and nonzero angular momentum. Yet we get good approximate results when we use Schwarzschild to model the Earth or the Sun or the Milky Way, and usually the bad results are fixable with linear corrections). But the real picture is that each of these bodies sources an unknown metric that is slightly different from Schwarzschild, and additionally one has to stitch together two metrics sourced by two bodies each sourcing (different, unknown) Schwarszschild-ish metrics into an (unknown) expanding background.

Numerical relativity has opened up the study of approximate solutions which give better results for real physical systems than the toolkit of known exact solutions (plus linear in v/c corrections), so one could argue that the central research programme in classical General Relativity is the study of the mechanisms that generate the (true) metric.

All that said, we can be much more confident (because of analyses under e.g. the parameterized post-Newtonian formalism and experimental data from gravitational probes of many varieties) about the fit of exact solutions to the bodies in our solar system than the fit of any metric to the cosmos-in-the-large. For the bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium that means Schwarzschild to at least the first order in v/c [in linearized gravity]. If you accept that Schwarzschild is an excellent substitute for the unknown real metric, then you must have a very close fit to a static, asymptotically flat spacetime. Around that you can establish a boundary condition. Outside the boundary is the expanding spacetime, inside is asymptotically flat (i.e., not expanding). Coles discusses some of this ( as does Hossenfelder at http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/08/you-dont-expand-jus... ).

Alternatively, you can argue that the real metric sourced by e.g. the Earth (or yourself at a distance where you subtend a very small angle on an observer's sky, or one of your molecules) is less close to Schwarzschild. In that case, Coles takes us back to Cooperstock via Ned Wright's Cosmology FAQ: you will get bad results with poor choices of coordinates (so use e.g. Fermi coordinates because then you know exactly where you have valid and comparable results, and you are forced to consider whether and where geodesics drift apart[1]).

Finally, if you were asking about "naive quintessence models" and their problems, ch 3.2 in Elise Jenning's _Simulations of Dark Energy Cosmologies_ (Springer, 2012) is a decent overview (it contains material from her Ph.D. thesis; she is now at KICP/FNAL).

> "actual proof"

This would make an excellent postdoc research project !

Linked with [1] above, on proving the conjecture, the soft underbelly is the behaviour of geodesics: in an expanding universe, comoving geodesics drift apart. The geodesics in Schwarzschild spacetime do not drift apart. Geodesics in the solar system do not drift apart, and haven't over the course of a few billion years. Geodesics at cosmological scales clearly do drift very noticeably apart over the same period of time. Worse, evidence suggests that the Hubble constant isn't constant in time, so where are the matching perturbations in the orbits of various bodies in the solar system? However, I'm not sure this is the right path to a definitive answer, since one is likely to be able to claim that your atoms in general are not following geodesics; their free-fall is interrupted by the surface of the Earth.

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