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am_Unition · 2388 days ago · link · · parent · post: Half the universe’s missing matter has just been finally found
It's quite a bit of matter, but distributed over a huge amount of space. There's a lot of space in between galaxies, so the average density is nowhere near as high as a galaxy's, but it all adds up to be a large amount of the total mass in the universe. The Milky Way's diameter is 100,000 light years, and the distance to our nearest neighbor, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years. I would suspect that the amount of matter in the tendrils connecting two galaxies is inversely proportional to the distance between them (but I don't care enough to actually read the paper, because my unfortunately finite intellectual capital is already stretched vanishingly thin at the moment).
nowaypablo · 2388 days ago · link ·
Ah, duh, there's a lot of space in space. Thanks.