Title: "Following the Footsteps of the Missing Baryons"
Abstract:
It is a remarkable fact that in the present day universe ~50% of the baryonic
matter is missing, in that is has not yet been accounted for observationally.
Hydrodynamic simulations of structure formation suggest that these baryons
likely reside in a warm/hot intergalactic medium (WHIM), with temperatures in
the range 1e5-1e7K. The WHIM is produced by the shock waves that occur as
gas falls from the diffuse intergalactic medium onto the dense regions where
galaxies form. In this talk, I will review the "missing baryons" problem, discuss
the current observational status, and describe detailed theoretical models of
intergalactic shocks, that are directly applicable to the missing baryon problem,
and may provide a way to identify and measure the missing baryonic mass.