Measure the cluster's baryonic mass, dominated by its intracluster medium with a smaller stellar contribution, and divide it by an independently inferred total mass. If this cluster baryon fraction is representative of the cosmic baryon fraction, then . Thus the cluster baryon-fraction estimate of matter density is
Big Bang nucleosynthesis constrains the baryon-to-photon ratio and hence through primordial light-element abundances. A specified converts this to ; the cluster mass and gas-mass estimates also have distance-dependent factors, which must be used consistently. This method estimates the total nonrelativistic matter density, including baryonic and dark matter. It does not add radiation or vacuum energy to that inferred ; in a matter-dominated interpretation the question's is this matter parameter.
Primordial deuterium as a baryon-density indicator works because increasing baryon density makes the destruction of deuterium into heavier nuclei more efficient during Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Smaller inferred primordial D/H therefore implies larger , with the other nucleosynthesis assumptions fixed. For a fixed measured cluster baryon fraction, a smaller primordial deuterium abundance raises the inferred matter density. A low abundance caused instead by stellar processing is not a lower primordial abundance; depletion, gas ejection and the representativeness of clusters must also be assessed before identifying the cluster fraction with the cosmic one.