Hydrogen and Dark Matter
Score another point for the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank. They have opened our eyes – and ears – to previously undetected region of hydrogen gas clouds located in the area between the massive Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies. If researchers are correct, these dwarf galaxy-sized sectors of isolated gases may have originated from a huge store of heated, ionized gas… Gas which may be associated with elusive and invisible dark matter.
“We have known for some time that many seemingly empty stretches of the Universe contain vast but diffuse patches of hot, ionized hydrogen,” said Spencer Wolfe of West Virginia University in Morgantown. “Earlier observations of the area between M31 and M33 suggested the presence of colder, neutral hydrogen, but we couldn’t see any details to determine if it had a definitive structure or represented a new type of cosmic feature. Now, with high-resolution images from the GBT, we were able to detect discrete concentrations of neutral hydrogen emerging out of what was thought to be a mainly featureless field of gas.”
This certainly is a fantastic find! As they said the so called "Empty Space" between galaxy has seen small patches of Hydrogen Gas floating around. For those of you who may not know, Hydrogen is a building block of everything in space.
It should however be noted Hydrogen itself is not the interesting thing here. How it behaves in space may give us clues into Dark Matter! Dark matter is a theoretical entity within outer space that holds a gravitational pull on all objects. This is a great thing, because it has a counter-part known as Dark Energy!
Dark energy does exactly the opposite as Dark matter, propelling all of the universe away from the epicenter of the big bang! It's quite an amazing theory, and lends a lot of explanations to how General Relativity works.
Your average Joe may not look at this information and see much of anything important. But to a scientific mind understanding how Dark Matter and Dark Energy works will lend us even more explanations of how the Universe(and maybe even Multi-Verse) works. It's kind of like the Higgs Boson of space!