Oh, There It Is!

So scientists have been wondering for years where part of the universe is.

Quick version, the universe is expanding as part of the effects of its beginning in what's usually called the Big Bang. Gravity acts against that expansion, slowing it down. When scientists compared the rate of expansion with the amount of matter they could see in the universe, the figures didn't match. The expansion was a lot slower than it should have been given the amount of matter they could observe.

One explanation has been "dark matter," or a kind of matter that can't be detected by the kinds of telescopes we can build. Its existence is sort of inferred by some models of how the universe began and by some observations of the known universe. Another is that much of the matter is in immense, very hot streams of matter called filaments, earlier mentioned here. Again, although they were theorized to exist, actual observation of these filaments had been limited.

Enter 22-year-old Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, doing a six-week summer internship at the University of Monash in Australia. Under the guidance of a university astronomer, she was to use an X-ray telescope to search for the filaments. And so she found them. What scientists had spend decades searching for, she found before even finishing her undergrad work, and the results were published with Fraser-McKelvie getting top billing over her two mentors in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Both of the mentors are Ph.D.s

Unfortunately, the sober nature of science asserted itself and the paper was titled "An estimate of the electron density in filaments of galaxies at z~0.1," rather than the more definitive "How I Spent My Summer Vacation."