Where the Baryons Are

Abstract

A fair and complete accounting of cosmic baryons now appears possible, because most of them are in states which are either directly observable or reliably constrained by indirect arguments. More than three-quarters of the baryons are probably in hot ionized gas clustering, along with galaxies and dark matter, in the cosmic web. The rest are in galaxies, roughly equally distributed between old stellar populations and star-forming disk populations; within the latter, mass is distributed about equally between stars and (mostly neutral and molecular) gas. The total amount of matter agrees with that required for concordance of cosmic light element abundances with Standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, a neat result inviting deeper studies of baryon evolution.