The Universe’s “Missing Matter” Found Within Superheated Cosmic Web Filaments

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The cosmic web is similar in shape to a neural network. sakkmesterke/Shutterstock

Everything you can see around you is composed of “ordinary matter.” Looking at the remnant radiation of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), scientists have calculated that this matter consists of only five percent of the entire universe. A significant amount of this still eluded direct detection, however, until now: A new paper published in Nature claims to have found this missing component, which has been hiding within very hot gas along colossal strands of the “cosmic web.”