Ciencia-Física

Today an international team of researchers announced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family, which makes them cousins of the familiar proton and neutron. The LHCb collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, used CERN's Large Hadron Collider to make these discoveries.

Where is the half of the ordinary matter in the universe not observed yet? Computer simulations of cosmological galaxy formation predict the existence of large intercluster filaments of hot and low-density gas, the so-called cosmic web. For the first time, ESA’s Planck satellite has observed one of such filaments in the merging cluster pair A399-A401; the discovery is based on the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. The observed temperature and baryon density are consistent with previous theoretical estimates, pointing towards a solution to the missing baryon conundrum. This new result is Part VIII of a series of 11 papers to be published by the Planck Collaboration in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (the paper has 210 authors, 19 of which are affiliated with a Spanish institution) 1.