• Question: what is the universe made of?

    Asked by anon-220323 on 18 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Kaitlin Wade

      Kaitlin Wade answered on 18 Jun 2019:

      I wasn’t sure myself. Quick googling brought me to this page, which seems to discuss it quite well! https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_matter.html

      Mainly gas, energy and matter!

    • Photo: Shobhana Nagraj

      Shobhana Nagraj answered on 18 Jun 2019:

      I think Kaitlin has this one covered! 🙂

    • Photo: Nina Rzechorzek

      Nina Rzechorzek answered on 19 Jun 2019:

      Love the NASA website Kaitlin – it’s my ‘go-to’ for these space questions!

    • Photo: Marianne King

      Marianne King answered on 19 Jun 2019:

      From looking online it seems astrophysicists think the universe is made of normal matter (atoms), dark matter and energy. Dark matter can’t be seen but scientists believe it’s there because without it all our galaxies would fly apart. It makes up 80% of all the matter in the universe. It’s very difficult to detect dark matter, but scientists think that the particles that make up dark matter can collide with the nucleus of an atom that makes up normal matter. This could cause a gamma ray, which are detectable. However scientists don’t know whether they can tell that these gamma rays are definitely from these dark matter collisions, they could be from something else! Lots of very clever people are working on dark matter so hopefully one day we should know more about it! This article was where I this answer from. It was fun to read, and has some pretty pictures in it (pretty science pictures make me very happy).
      http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20150824-what-is-the-universe-made-of

    • Photo: Ross Hill

      Ross Hill answered on 19 Jun 2019:

      71% dark energy
      24% dark matter
      5% matter

      Mostly stuff we don’t know about….

      But…. More excitingly…. the atoms that make up your body were made in stars… YOU ARE STAR DUST!

    • Photo: Kate Timms

      Kate Timms answered on 19 Jun 2019:

      As the others have said, it’s mostly made of stuff we don’t really know anything about. It’s kind of amazing (and scary) to think that the stuff that the majority of the universe is made of is ‘missing’, at least to us.

    • Photo: Matthew Bareford

      Matthew Bareford answered on 19 Jun 2019:

      Matter, Dark Matter, and things we just haven’t worked out yet!

Comments

  • Photo: Philippe

    Philippe commented on :

    The Universe is mostly made of atoms. These are mostly hydrogen ones because it is simply a proton that has caught an electron. There are also heavier elements which formed, by gluing protons and neutrons together, in stars or during the first moments after the Big Bang. This matter is present as gas, as Kaitlin said, or has clumped into stars and planets. There is also electromagnetic radiation, like light. Finally, there are also less usual forms of matter like neutrinos zooming through space at almost the speed of light. But all this is only the matter we know and it turns out that we don’t know what most of the Universe is made of. For example, a lot of matter is unaccounted for. This is what we dubbed dark matter. When we look at stars rotating around the centre of their galaxies, we realise that they are going too fast for the amount of matter we see (they move so quickly that they should escape). So there must be more of it. We don’t know what dark matter is made of. This could be simply gas we can’t see or new types of particles we don’t know. Even more puzzling, we discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. We don’t understand why but we can describe it by using a mysterious fluid with odd properties that would account for almost 3/4 of the density of the Universe. We called it dark energy but, once again, we don’t know what it is. So the sort answer is atoms plus tons of things we have no clue about.