According to a report from Leah Crane at New Scientist:
The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe – protons, neutrons and electrons – unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space.
Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas.
Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas.
…
Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before.
Baryon, any member of one of two classes of hadrons (particles built from quarks and thus experiencing the strong nuclear force). Baryons are heavy subatomic particles that are made up of three quarks. Both protons and neutrons, as well as other particles, are baryons. (The other class of hadronic particle is built from a quark and an antiquark and is called a meson.) Britannica
Baryons Baryons are massive particles which are made up of three quarks in the standard model. This class of particles includes the proton and neutron. Other baryons are the lambda, sigma, xi, and omega particles. Baryons are distinct from mesons in that mesons are composed of only two quarks. Baryons and mesons are included in the overall class known as hadrons, the particles which interact by the strong force. Baryons are fermions, while the mesons are bosons. Besides charge and spin (1/2 for the baryons), two other quantum numbers are assigned to these particles: baryon number (B=1) and strangeness (S), which in the chart can be seen to be equal to -1 times the number of strange quarks included. (Hyperphysics)
Keep the file open but remember: We did find the Higgs boson (and Peter Higgs got the Nobel). But gravitational waves and dark energy are questionable despite the Nobels awarded.
“Everybody sort of knows that it has to be there, but this is the first time that somebody – two different groups, no less – has come up with a definitive detection,” says Ralph Kraft at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.
“This goes a long way toward showing that many of our ideas of how galaxies form and how structures form over the history of the universe are pretty much correct,” he says. More.
That won’t be good news for the cosmologists who need to upend the Standard Model in order to save, say, string theory. They need a situation where nothing makes sense apart from their theories.
See also: Peter Higgs on how to survive in science today (Don’t do what he did.)
and
Rob Sheldon on Physics Nobel for gravitational waves: Another PC moment in science?