On the largest scales in our universe today, matter is woven together into a filamentary network dubbed the ‘cosmic web.’ This complex structure emerged over billions of years out of an initial nearly uniform distribution of matter. But for years, researchers struggled with a puzzle: a large fraction of the baryons observed in that early-universe distribution seemed to disappear into darkness by the late universe. They were hiding, unobservable, somewhere in the cosmic web. In this talk I will discuss some of the challenges and recent successes in observing these baryons.
Giada Caneva, Elia Bertoldo, Clara Fernandez Castañer