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Evidence is piling up that much of the universe’s missing matter is lurking along the strands of a vast cosmic web.

A pair of papers report some of the best signs yet of hot gas in the spaces between galaxy clusters, possibly enough to represent the half of all ordinary matter previously unaccounted for. Previous studies have hinted at this missing matter, but a new search technique is helping to fill in the gaps in the cosmic census where other efforts fell short. The papers were published online at arXiv.org on September 15 and September 29.
Two independent teams stacked images of hundreds of thousands of galaxies on top of one another to reveal diffuse filaments of gas connecting pairs of galaxies across millions of light-years. Measuring how the gas distorted the background light of the universe let the researchers determine the mass of ordinary matter, or baryons, that it held — the protons and neutrons that make up atoms.

“It’s a very important problem,” says Dominique Eckert of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, who has searched for the missing matter via X-rays emitted by individual strands. “If you want to understand how galaxies form and how everything forms within a galaxy, you have to understand the evolution of the baryon content.” That starts with knowing where it is.

About 85 percent of the matter in the universe is mysterious, invisible stuff called dark matter, which physicists have yet to find (SN Online: 9/6/17). Weirdly, about half of the ordinary matter is also unaccounted for. When astronomers look around at the galaxies in the nearest few billion light-years, they find only about half the baryons that should have been produced in the Big Bang.

The rest is probably hiding in long filaments of gas that connect galaxy clusters in a vast cosmic web (SN: 3/8/14, p. 8). Previous attempts to find the baryons focused on X-rays emitted by gas in the filaments (SN Online: 8/4/15) or on the light of distant quasars filtering through these cobwebby strands (SN: 5/13/00, p. 310). But those efforts were either inconclusive, or were sensitive to such a narrow range of gas temperatures that they missed much of the matter.

Now there might be a way to find the rest. Two groups — cosmologist Hideki Tanimura, who did the work while at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and his colleagues, and Anna de Graaff of the University of Edinburgh and her colleagues — have sought the missing matter in a new way. Both teams found a way to look through the gas all the way back to the oldest light in the universe.
“Filamentary gas is very difficult to detect, but now we have a technique to detect it,” says Tanimura, now with the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France.

That ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang. When this light passes though clouds of electrons in space — such as those found in filaments of hot gas — it gets deflected and distorted in a specific way. The Planck satellite released an all-sky map of these distortions in 2015 (SN: 3/21/15, p. 7).

Tanimura and de Graaff separately figured that there would be more distortion along the filaments than in empty space. To locate the filaments, both teams chose pairs of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey catalog that were at least 20 million light-years apart. De Graaff’s team chose roughly a million pairs, and Tanimura’s team chose 262,864 pairs. Both teams assumed that the galaxies were not part of the same cluster, but that they should be connected by a filament.

The filaments were still too faint to see individually, so the teams used software to layer all the images and subtracted out distortion from electrons in the galaxies to see what was left. Both saw a residual distortion in the cosmic microwave background, which they attribute to the filaments.

Next, de Graaff’s team calculated that those filaments account for 30 percent of the total baryon content of the universe. That’s surely an underestimate, since they didn’t examine every filament in the universe, the team writes — the rest of the missing matter is probably there too.

“Both groups here took the obvious first step,” says Michael Shull of the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the new studies. “I think they’re on the right track.” But he worries that the gas they see might have been ejected from galaxies at high speeds, and so not actually the missing matter at all.

Eckert also worries that the gas may belong more to the galaxies than to their intergalactic tethers. Future observations of the composition of the gas, as well as more sensitive X-ray observations, could help solve that part of the puzzle.

MINNEAPOLIS — Birds don’t need to be drenched in crude oil to be harmed by spills and leaks.

Ingesting even small amounts of oil can interfere with the animals’ normal behavior, researchers reported November 15 at the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry North America. Birds can take in these smaller doses by preening slightly greasy feathers or eating contaminated food, for example.

Big oil spills, such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, leave a trail of dead and visibly oily birds (SN: 4/18/15, p. 22). But incidents like last week’s 5,000-barrel spill from the Keystone pipeline — and smaller spills that don’t make national headlines — can also impact wildlife, even if they don’t spur dramatic photos.
To test how oil snacks might affect birds, researchers fed zebra finches small amounts of crude oil or peanut oil for two weeks, then analyzed the birds’ blood and behavior. Birds fed the crude oil were less active and spent less time preening their feathers than birds fed peanut oil, said study coauthor Christopher Goodchild, an ecotoxicologist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

Oil-soaked birds will often preen excessively to try to remove the oil, sometimes at the expense of other important activities such as feeding. But in this case, the birds didn’t have any crude oil on their feathers, so the decrease in preening is probably a sign they’re not feeling well, the researchers say.

Exactly how the oil affects the birds’ activity levels isn’t clear. Researchers suspected that oil might deprive birds of oxygen by affecting hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood. Blood tests didn’t turn up any evidence of damaged hemoglobin proteins but did find some evidence that oil-sipping birds might be anemic, Goodchild said. At the higher of two crude oil doses, birds’ blood contained less hemoglobin per red blood cell, a sign of anemia.
The findings, while preliminary, add to a growing pile of evidence that estimates of the number of animals impacted by oil spills might be too low. For instance, even a light sheen of oil on sandpipers’ wings makes it harder to fly, costing birds more energy, a different group of researchers reported earlier this year. That could affect everything from birds’ daily movements to long-distance migration.

Movies and other media are full of mixed messages about the risks and rewards of building machines with minds of their own. For every manipulative automaton like Ex Machina’s Ava (SN: 5/16/15, p. 26), there’s a helpful Star Wars droid. And while some tech titans such as Elon Musk warn of the threats artificial intelligence presents, others, including Mark Zuckerberg, dismiss the doomsayers.

AI researcher Toby Walsh’s Machines That Think is for anyone who has heard the hype and is seeking a critical assessment of what the technology can do — and what it might do in the future. Walsh’s conversational style is welcoming to nonexperts while his endnotes point readers to opportunities for deeper dives into specific aspects of AI.
Walsh begins with a history of AI, from Aristotle’s foundation of formal logic to modern facial-recognition systems. Excerpts from computer-composed poetry and tales of computers trouncing humans at strategy games (SN: 11/11/17, p. 13) are a testament to how far AI has come. But Walsh also highlights weaknesses, such as machine-learning algorithms’ reliance on so much data to master a single task.

This 30,000-foot view of AI research packs a lot of history, as well as philosophical and technical explanation. Walsh personalizes the account with stories of his own programming experiences, anecdotes about AI in daily life — like his daughter’s use of Siri — and his absolute, unapologetic love of puns.

Later in the book, Walsh speculates about technical hurdles that may curb further AI development and legal limits that society may want to impose. He also explores the societal impact that increasingly intelligent computers may have.
For instance, Walsh evaluates how likely various jobs are to be outsourced to AI. Some occupations, like journalist, will almost certainly be automated, he argues. Others, like oral surgeon, are probably safe. For future job security, Walsh recommends pursuing careers that require programming acumen, emotional intelligence or creativity.

AI also has the potential to revolutionize warfare. “Like Moore’s law, we are likely to see exponential growth in the capabilities of autonomous weapons,” Walsh writes. “I have named this ‘Schwarzenegger’s law’ to remind us of where it will end.” Walsh isn’t resigned to a Terminator-like future, though. If governments ban killer robots and arms developers use automation to enhance defensive equipment, he believes military AI could actually save many lives.

In fact, Walsh argues, all aspects of AI’s future impacts are in our hands. “Artificial intelligence can lead us down many different paths, some good and some bad,” he writes. “Society must choose which path to take.”