Speaker
Description
Observations of galaxies and galaxy clusters in the local universe cannot account for the total baryon content inferred from measurements of the cosmic microwave background and from big bang nucleosynthesis [1,2]. Locating the missing baryons has been one of the major challenges in cosmology. Cosmological simulations predict that they are spread throughout filamentary structures in the cosmic web, forming the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) [3]. Large observational searches have resulted in a few detections of the WHIM [4], but there was no clear picture of the large-scale extent of this gas. I will present the recent detection of the WHIM in stacked large-scale filaments through the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect [5]. This result establishes the presence of diffuse ionised gas in large-scale filaments, and suggests that the missing baryons problem may be resolved via observations of the cosmic web.
