Related papers: Have the missing cosmic baryons been found?
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…
Approximately half of the Universe's dark matter resides in collapsed halos; significantly less than half of the baryonic matter (protons and neutrons) remains confined to halos. A small fraction of baryons are in stars and the interstellar…
In this white paper, we summarize current observations of the baryon census at low redshift (Shull, Smith, & Danforth 2012). Measurements of Lya, O-VI, and broad Lya absorbers, together with more careful corrections for metallicity and…
It has been known for decades that the observed number of baryons in the local universe falls about 30-40% short of the total number of baryons predicted by Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis, as inferred from density fluctuations of the Cosmic…
New, high resolution, large-scale, cosmological hydrodynamic galaxy formation simulations of a standard cold dark matter model (with a cosmological constant) are utilized to predict the distribution of baryons at the present and at moderate…
Observations of the cosmic microwave background indicate that baryons account for 5% of the Universe's total energy content. In the local Universe, the census of all observed baryons falls short of this estimate by a factor of two.…
The missing baryon problem is one of the major unsolved problems in astronomy. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright millisecond pulses with unknown origins. The dispersion measure of FRBs is defined as the electron column density along the…
The current census of observed baryons in the local Universe is still missing a significant fraction of them according to standard Big-Bang nucleosynthesis. Numerical simulations predict that most of the missing baryons are in a hot…
Recent Cosmological measurements indicate that baryons comprise about four percent of the total mass-energy density of the Universe, which is in accord with the predictions arising from studies of the production of the lightest elements. It…
We describe our surveys of low column density Lyman-alpha absorbers [N(HI) = 10^(12.5-16.0) cm^-2], which show that the warm photoionized IGM contains 30% of all baryons at z < 0.1. This fraction is consistent with cosmological simulations,…
More than three quarters of the baryonic content of the Universe resides in a highly diffuse state that is difficult to observe, with only a small fraction directly observed in galaxies and galaxy clusters. Censuses of the nearby Universe…
The number of detected baryons in the low-redshift Universe (z < 1) is far small er than the corresponding number of baryons observed at higher redshift. According to hydrodynamical simulations for the formation of structure in the…
Only about 10% of the baryons in the universe lie in galaxies as stars or cold gas, with the remainder predicted to exist as a dilute gaseous filamentary network known as the Cosmic Web. Some of this gas is detected through UV absorption…
At low redshift (z<2), almost half of the baryons in the Universe are not found in bound structures like galaxies and clusters and therefore most likely reside in a Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), as predicted by simulations. Attempts…
We derive analytic lower bounds on the cosmic baryon density by requiring that the high-redshift IGM contain enough neutral hydrogen to produce the observed \lya absorption in quasar spectra. The key theoretical assumption is that absorbing…
For low-redshift cosmology and galaxy formation rates, it is important to account for all the baryons synthesized in the Big Bang. Although galaxies and clusters contain 10% of the baryons, many more reside in the photoionized Lyman-alpha…
Standard big bang nucleosynthesis predicts the average baryon density of the Universe to be a few percent of the critical density. Only about one tenth of the predicted baryons have been seen. A plausible respository for the missing baryons…
The amount of detected baryons in the local Universe is at least a factor of two smaller than measured at high redshift. It is believed that a significant fraction of the baryons in the current Universe is "hiding" in a hot filamentary…
The cluster baryon fraction is estimated from the CMB-scattering leptonic component of the intracluster medium (ICM); however, the observed cluster baryon fraction is less than the cosmic one. Understanding the origin of this discrepancy is…
The baryon content around local galaxies is observed to be much less than is needed in Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Simulations indicate that a significant fraction of these "missing baryons" may be stored in a hot tenuous circum-galactic…