All of the Universe's missing matter found?

[Brian G Turner]

Continuing from the following thread - Half the universe’s missing matter found - a new study suggests all of the mass that needs accounting for in current Cosmology exists between galactic clumps in the "warm-hot intergalactic medium " aka WHIM: Where is the universe hiding its missing mass?

The caveat is that it doesn't account for the issue of "dark matter" within galaxies - but I strongly suspect that we haven't been looking hard enough for the gas and dust there. After all, it's hard enough to find the massive amounts inbetween galaxies, let alone the smaller amounts within them.

 

[CTRandall]

I think the acronym "WHIM" says it all. There is a culture within the sciences that latches onto catchy ideas--ideas that have neat metaphors for explaining to the public or that have an element of "beauty", e.g. symmetry or simplicity--regardless of a lack of evidence or even a testable hypothesis. Astronomers and physicists are human, too, and funding bodies even more so, I suppose, which I suspect is the main reason we get MACHOs and WIMPs and WHIMs.

In regard to the dark matter within galaxies, I wouldn't be surprised if we have a massive paradigm shift in our understanding of gravity and/or mass within the next 25 years. Something on the scale of quantum mechanics that opens up huge new areas of research. All of the current theories seem to come up short in ways reminiscent of the late-19th century and we seem ripe for something different.

 

[LordOfWizards]

I want to zero in on a specific quote in the referenced article:

...they detected oxygen with characteristics suggesting it was in a gas with a temperature of about one million degrees Kelvin.
Read more at: Where is the universe hiding its missing mass?

Can someone explain to me how you get any gas - let alone oxygen - to one million degrees Kelvin without radiating light in the visible spectrum? The surface of the sun is a mere 6000 degrees Kelvin. Is there some crucial axiom in physics I am overlooking?