Where Are the Baryons?

Abstract

New high-resolution, large-scale cosmological hydrodynamic galaxy formation simulations of a standard cold dark matter model (with a cosmological constant) are utilized to predict the distribution of baryons at the present and at moderate redshift. It is found that the average temperature of baryons is an increasing function of time, with most of the baryons at the present time having a temperature in the range of 10 5 -10 7 K. Thus not only is the universe dominated by dark matter, but more than one-half of the normal matter is yet to be detected. Detection of this warm/hot gas poses an observational challenge, which requires sensitive EUV and X-ray satellites. Signatures include a soft cosmic X-ray background, apparent warm components in hot clusters due to both intrinsic warm intracluster and intercluster gas projected onto clusters along the line of sight, absorption lines in X-ray and UV quasar spectra [e.g., O VI (1032, 1038) A lines, O VII 574 eV line], strong emission lines (e.g., O VIII 653 eV line), and low-redshift, broad, low column density Lyα absorption lines. We estimate that approximately one-fourth of the extragalactic soft X-ray background (at 0.7 keV) arises from the warm/hot gas, half of it coming from z <0.65, and three-quarters coming from z <1.00, so the source regions should be identifiable on deep optical images.