Decades ago, astronomers estimated that “ordinary” matter (basically everything that isn’t dark matter or dark energy) makes up 5% of the universe. There was just one problem—they had no idea where most of it was.

A new landmark study has pinpointed the location of the universe's "missing" matter, and detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) on record. Using FRBs as a guide, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Caltech have shown that more than three-quarters of the universe's ordinary matter has been hiding in the thin gas between galaxies,

Bright flashes of enigmatic radio waves have helped illuminate some of the missing matter in the universe, astronomers say in a new study.