from Hacker News

The Last of the Universe’s Ordinary Matter Has Been Found

by amaks on 9/10/18, 5:55 PM with 61 comments

• by gcbw2 on 9/10/18, 7:34 PM

  The hypothesis is they should see CMB distortion between galaxies, which is hidden by the distortion caused by the galaxies themselves. The solution was to assume they were removing the distortion caused by the galaxy halo, and what was left was the original distortion they were looking for.

  sounds like the work to rule out false-positives would be huge. This is putting a lot of weight on a technique that is not fully described in the paper (i might have missed, just glanced at them for now, and i am an amateur that just like to fiddle with similar data).

• by TomMckenny on 9/10/18, 7:44 PM

  Slightly related, I wonder if anyone has figured out the density of interstellar comet or asteroid like objects.

  I notice that Oumuamua happened to pass within some 20 million km of earth within a decade or so of having systems in place to spot it. Wouldn't this imply there are an awful lot of them?

• by gmailsyncer on 9/10/18, 6:26 PM

  There must be regions of the universe where this "not very dense" gas is dense enough to use a ramscoop

• by yalogin on 9/10/18, 8:14 PM

  I know and understand nothing about this topic but given the fact that the universe is infinite by definition makes the conclusive/definitive statement very surprising.