---
title: "Where did half the Universe disappear to: black holes scattered the missing matter"
description: "Scientists have finally found the missing matter of the Universe! 🌌 It turns out that black holes and supernovae have scattered gas far beyond the boundaries of galaxies. Fast radio bursts were used for the search — a powerful new tool in astrophysics. 🔭✨"
date: 2026-07-26T05:14:00.000Z
lang: en
url: https://xab.info/en/posts/where-did-half-the-universe-disappear-to-black-holes-scattered-the-missing-matter
tags: [universe, black-holes, mit, astronomy, fast-radio-bursts]
publisher: "XAB.info"
---

# Where did half the Universe disappear to: black holes scattered the missing matter

![Nebula and stars on a dark background, symbolizing the missing matter in the Universe scattered by black holes](https://xab.info/media/2026/07/26/uchenyie-objasnili-kuda-delasia-propavshaya-materiya-v-vselennoy/uchenyie-objasnili-kuda-delasia-propavshaya-materiya-v-vselennoy-1.webp)

For decades, astronomers have been unable to find a significant portion of the ordinary matter that makes up our world. According to calculations, there should be more matter in the Universe than we can see. Now, scientists have managed to explain where this "missing" matter went. It turns out that powerful outbursts from black holes have scattered gas far beyond the boundaries of galaxies.

### The mystery of the missing baryons

Everything around us — planets, stars, and humans themselves — is made of baryonic matter. This is matter formed from protons and neutrons. Cosmological models predict that baryons should make up about 17% of the total mass-energy of the early Universe. However, actual observations yielded only 10% of this value.

For a long time, researchers believed that the missing 90% consisted of cold, diffuse gas hidden in intergalactic space. However, proving its existence and precisely determining its location proved extremely difficult.

### Fast radio bursts as a search tool

A breakthrough in solving this problem was made thanks to the use of fast radio bursts (FRBs). These are high-energy, short bursts of radio emission of extragalactic origin, lasting from milliseconds to seconds.

When a radio signal passes through matter, it undergoes dispersion and smears out over time. The degree of this smearing allows scientists to accurately calculate the density of matter along the signal's path. A team of researchers compared the smearing parameters of thousands of archived signals with the locations of more than 6 million galaxies.

"We are finding that activity in galaxies is more chaotic than we thought. They are more like fountains, actually pushing gas out to very large distances," said study author Haochen Wang from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

### Giant gas halos

The main discovery was how far baryonic matter deviates from its parent galaxies. The detected gas clouds extend to distances significantly exceeding the values provided by computer modeling.

"A galaxy has a size, perhaps, of a few hundred thousand light-years, and we found the lost matter at a distance of about 4 million light-years," noted study co-author, MIT physicist Kiyoshi Masui.

The obtained data indicates that high-energy processes are acting much more intensively than previously thought. It is precisely the relativistic jets of supermassive black holes and supernova explosions that push baryonic matter far into intergalactic space, forming giant diffuse halos.

### A new stage in space exploration

The results of the work, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, confirm the correctness of basic astrophysical models. Moreover, they open up a new effective tool for studying the evolution of the Universe.

"We made this work for the first time, and it will work even more accurately as data improves," Masui concluded.

Fast radio bursts, first discovered in 2007, are becoming a powerful means of probing the intergalactic medium. Thanks to the ability of high-energy radiation to interact with matter, FRBs allow researchers to study the structure and composition of the Universe on scales inaccessible to standard optical and X-ray telescopes.