Astronomers Identified a Piece of the Milky Way's Missing Matter

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Astronomers identified a piece of the Milky Way's missing matter:

The majority of the universe's mass is believed to be mysterious dark matter and dark energy. 5 percent is 'normal matter' that makes up stars, planets, asteroids, etc. This is known as baryonic matter.

[...] Yuanming Wang, a doctoral candidate in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, has developed an ingenious method to track down the missing matter. Using the technique, Wang pinpointed a hitherto undetected stream of cold gas in the Milky Way about ten light-years from Earth.

The cloud is about a trillion kilometers long and 10 billion kilometers wide[*] but only weighing about our Moon's mass.

Ms. Wang, who is pursuing her Ph.D. at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, said, "We suspect that much of the 'missing' baryonic matter is in the form of cold gas clouds either in galaxies or between galaxies."

"This gas is undetectable using conventional methods, as it emits no visible light of its own and is just too cold for detection via radio astronomy."

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