GIZMODO - Using a supercomputer, a team of physicists has confirmed a discrepancy between observations of the universe and theoretical predictions about its structure.
The team used PRIYA, a suite of simulations that takes optical light data from two surveys to refine cosmological parameters, to determine constraints on measurements of the universe and its evolution. The team’s research was published earlier this month in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Using PRIYA, the team studied spectrograms, which are images of hydrogen emission lines in the universe. The spectrograms captured the Lyman-Alpha forest, a dense crowd of absorption lines in spectra from quasars, extremely bright light sources in the universe.
In the team’s spectrograms, spikes of missing frequencies indicated the “atoms and molecules that the light has encountered along the way,” said Simeon Bird, a physicist at UC Riverside and co-author of the research, in a university release. “Since each type of atom has a specific way of absorbing light, leaving a sort of signature in the spectrogram, it is possible to trace their presence, especially that of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe,” he added.