American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 19(115), 2015
DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.115.191301
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Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license.-- et al. ; We estimate the amount of the missing baryons detected by the Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background in the direction of central galaxies (CGs) identified in the Sloan galaxy survey. The peculiar motion of the gas inside and around the CGs unveils values of the Thomson optical depth τT in the range 0.2-2×10-4, indicating that the regions probed around CGs contain roughly half of the total amount of baryons in the Universe at the epoch where the CGs are found. If baryons follow dark matter, the measured τT's are compatible with the detection of all of the baryons existing inside and around the CGs. ; C. H.-M. acknowledges the support of Ramón y Cajal Fellowship No. RyC-2011-08262, Marie Curie Career Integration Grant No. 294183, and Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Project No. AYA2012-30789. Y.-Z. M thanks ERC for its support through Starting Grant No. 307209. ; Peer Reviewed