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Concept

Warm-hot intergalactic medium

A glowing orange and yellow spiral structure with radiating filaments against a dark background, representing the warm-hot intergalactic medium.

A diffuse plasma at temperatures of one hundred thousand to ten million kelvin, threading the cosmic web between galaxies in long filaments. Predicted by simulations in the late 1990s as a hiding place for the universe's missing ordinary matter, it has since been partially detected through X-ray absorption against background quasars. It may contain more baryons than every star and galaxy combined.

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