Missing Mass Found! (or close enough for government work)

In many scientific disciplines, theories are axiomatic. Thus, all studies are contorted to fit the theory, whatever the results may be. Whenever I see some bold scientific headline, I like to dig in to see if the results aren't actually the complete opposite of the claims. We saw that a while back with the fox study, where a single gene - with no known influence on behavior - was found to be correlated with the domesticated population, thus they proclaimed evidence of a genetic basis for fox domestication. The correct headline should have read Fox Genome Reveals no Genetic Basis for Traits of Domestication. When liberals say we don't believe in science, they are right. Scientific belief hinders scientific progress. How many billions are wasted each year, how many thousands of hours by our smartest braniacs, by pretending the results are what people believe they should be.

A recent article from Nasa, Where is the Universe Hiding its Missing Mass?, leads off with a bold claim.

New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped solve the Universe's "missing mass" problem, as reported in our latest press release. Astronomers cannot account for about a third of the normal matter — that is, hydrogen, helium, and other elements — that were created in the first billion years or so after the Big Bang.

To be clear, they aren't talking about dark matter which, in conjunction with dark energy, is estimated to make up 96% of the universe. No, they're talking about good old-fashioned non-exotic matter like what we touch and breathe each day. Stuff that really exists. This missing mass is due to Big Bang models which predict that there should be 50% more visible mass in the universe than we observe. What do astronomers do when theories don't match observations? They find new observations.

Scientists have proposed that the missing mass could be hidden in gigantic strands or filaments of warm (temperature less than 100,000 Kelvin) and hot (temperature greater than 100,000 K) gas in intergalactic space. ... If these filaments exist, they could absorb certain types of light such as X-rays that pass through them.

The theory is that these giant strands of gas are somehow obscuring radiation from the visible universe. Like black holes, dark matter, dark energy, and neutronium, the missing matter cannot be observed, only inferred. Interestingly, the article doesn't mention why astronomers assume that free-floating neutrally charged gases would naturally organize themselves into gigantic strands and filaments.

The latest result uses a new technique that both hones the search for the WHIM carefully and boosts the relatively weak absorption signature by combining different parts of the spectrum to find a valid signal. With this technique, researchers identified 17 possible filaments lying between the quasar and Earth, and obtained their distances.

For each filament the spectrum was shifted in wavelength to remove the effects of cosmic expansion, and then the spectra of all the filaments were added together so that the resulting spectrum has a much stronger signal from absorption by the WHIM than in the individual spectra.

Indeed, the team did not find absorption in the individual spectra. But by adding them together, they turned a 5.5-day-long observation into the equivalent of almost 100 days' worth (about 8 million seconds) of data. This revealed an absorption line from oxygen expected to be present in a gas with a temperature of about one million Kelvin.

By extrapolating from these observations of oxygen to the full set of elements, and from the observed region to the local Universe, the researchers report they can account for the complete amount of missing matter.

Well how about that. Sure, they didn't find the absorption spectra for the elements they were looking for at the temperatures they were looking for, but they did find an absorption signal for oxygen (the 3rd most common element) at a very high temperature, so they extrapolated that to all the other elements (which they didn't see) and called it a success. The results depend on the existence of supermassive million-degree filaments that comprise a full third of the universe, but can't be seen. In addition, the theory depends on all the following unproven theories.

1. The Big Bang, without which there is no (visible) mass discrepancy.
2. The expanding universe / dark energy theory, which they used to shift the observed frequencies.
3. Red shift theory, which implies that quasars - highly redshifted - are impossibly luminous objects in the far reaches of space.

In an honest assessment, they would have concluded that direct observations fail to convincingly support the theory. However, that conclusion is assumed to be wrong (since theories are assumed to be true), so scientists scrape for any hint of supporting evidence and call it a great victory for science. Scientists can always find what they're paid to find, and avoid results that would incur institutional scorn. These scientists have taken us another step back, but they will still get their grants, academic citations, and adulations from an adoring press. Why wouldn't they strive to publish the desired - rather than actual - result? Sure, they've added super-massive, super-hot, super-invisible strands of matter across the entire universe, but when we already have black holes, dark matter, dark energy, neutron stars, and big bangs from a state of pure energy, the hypothetical hidden-but-non-dark matter is no great stretch of imagination.