• Question: What is the universe made of?

    Asked by anon-267480 on 5 Nov 2020. This question was also asked by anon-267369.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      The universe we can see – stars, planets, interstellar gas – is only a few percent of the matter in the universe, we think. The rest is dark matter – thought we haven’t found out what it is yet, so there could be some exciting discoveries that change our understanding there. And matter only makes up a small fraction of the energy in the universe – there is also apparently a mysterious force called “dark energy” pushing the universe apart, though the same thing happens – we haven’t found it yet, and there are people still debating if it exists or what it is. In fact, when I was at school we didn’t even know the shape of the universe – this required the WMAP probe to tell us better what makes up the universe.

    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      About 5% stuff we know (matter)
      About 25% stuff we think we know but haven’t managed to catch (dark matter)
      About 70% stuff we have no idea what it is (dark energy)

    • Photo: K Sasitharan

      K Sasitharan answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      Well, 1-10% of the universe is Normal matter. This is 1-10% of the actual universe. This includes stars, humans, planets, everything that we can see.

      Remaining part of the universe is called ‘dark matter’ or ‘dark energy’. This is all still being studied by scientists. It shows how vast and incredible our universe is.

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 7 Nov 2020:

      Mostly we think it’s made up of stuff we don’t know much about called dark energy and dark matter! The ordinary matter that makes up stars and planets and stuff we can see is only about 5% of the universe and that matter is mostly empty space. In fact, if you removed all of the empty space in atoms (between the nucleus and electrons), all 7.5 billion people (roughly) in the world could fit in the volume of a sugar cube! Astrophysicists have lots of theories about what dark matter and dark energy are but we still need to do lots of research to know with more certainty.

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