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Friday physics fun: One of my favourite papers is Fukugita, M., & Peebles, P. J. E. (2004). The cosmic energy inventory. The Astrophysical Journal, 616(2), 643. arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0…
The paper attempts to estimate how much mass-energy of different kinds there are in the universe. Is there more plasma than gas? Is there more light than infrared radiation? Are there more primeval neutrinos than "new" cosmic rays?
It turns out that most of the mass-energy contents of the universe are dark matter and dark energy, with a small slice of normal baryonic matter, and a tiny fraction of energy of various kinds. public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…
Looking at baryonic matter, most of it is warm intergalactic plasma: ionized hydrogen and helium between galaxies, heated by falling in the gravitational fields of dark matter halos. Some of it is cool enough to be captured by galaxies, forming various gas components inside.
Some of that gas turns into stars, of which most are happily shining in elliptic galaxies and the bulges of spiral galaxies, with a minority in galactic disks and irregular galaxies. Most stars are lighter and more long-lived than the sun.
White dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, and brown dwarfs are a small fraction of this. Supermassive black holes are an even tinier fraction... about four times the total mass of planets. There has simply not been time to form much of these condensed remnants.
One of my favourite results from this: starlight contributes more mass-energy than planets. Still, starlight and other radiation is dwarfed by the background radiation from the big bang.
Generally, non-dark energy is tiny. The reason is that primordial energy has been red-shifted since the big bang, and recently produced energy come from wussy sources like stellar fusion (can max turn 0.7% of mass into energy) or gravitational accretion (gravity is weak).
Looking at this binding energy about half is the energy release from combing quarks into protons and neutrons during the big bang (all other fusion is a pale ember of that), while the rest is mostly settling into black holes and neutron stars.
One can also visualize using circle diagrams, which is mildly misleading since tiny categories get bigger circles than they "deserve", but on the plus side it is much easier to navigate: public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…
B Ménard made a nice logarithmic tree diagram (found at cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.northwes… ) that allows an at-a-glance comparison.
What I really like is the encyclopedic approach of the paper. It is a great overview of the standard cosmological model. It would still be great to see if there are any updates needed - the paper is after all 16 years old.
I think the main lesson is that we should not think matter is like the condensed molecular matter we are used to: most is dark matter (whatever that is) or plasma. Most energy is dark or primordial microwaves. Most of the universe is alien stuff.
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