For decades, cosmologists have carried a quiet unease: the universe, by their best calculations, holds far more ordinary matter than stars and galaxies alone can account for. Now, a team of researchers using the CHIME telescope in British Columbia has traced that missing matter to vast, diffuse halos enveloping galaxies — invisible clouds stretching millions of light-years into the dark. The discovery, made possible by reading the fingerprints left on fast radio bursts as they cross the cosmos, suggests that black holes and supernovae scatter matter far more violently than our models ever imag