• Question: what is the universe made of

    Asked by anon-279093 on 2 Feb 2021.
    • Photo: Martin Ward

      Martin Ward answered on 2 Feb 2021:


      I think the safest answer to this would be ‘stuff’, the composition of the universe isnt known exactly and scientists seem to discover new particles and develop new theories to describe the universe that rely on the presence of an as yet unknown ‘thing’. I think it would be best if you look in to this yourself, there are some cool/weird/interesting things to find out. One example would be ‘dark matter’ which is something thought to make up the majority of the universe, yet we cannot see or detect it, check the wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

    • Photo: Kat Hunter

      Kat Hunter answered on 2 Feb 2021:


      Atoms!

    • Photo: Alin Elena

      Alin Elena answered on 2 Feb 2021:


      the things we know, all these elementary particles that people at cern study, for example, plus all the other things we do not know about yet.

    • Photo: Neil Corcoran

      Neil Corcoran answered on 2 Feb 2021:


      Great question! The simplest way of looking at it is that it is made of matter and antimatter. you are probably most familiar with matter! There is a lot of space between particles in ‘space’ itself, but don’t think space is empty. There are lots of different particles travelling through it at any time. Sometimes matter comes together to make things like planets and stars – the things you will be most familiar with.

    • Photo: Philip Ratcliffe

      Philip Ratcliffe answered on 2 Feb 2021:


      Mainly empty space! Lots of protons, neutrons and electrons that go to make up atoms and molecules, the stars, the planets. But in between there’s just not very much there really.
      Actually, we know that there must be lots of “something” out there that we just can’t see, much much more than all the things we can see. We don’t know what it is exactly; we just know it’s there because we can see the gravitational effect it has, but nothing else.

    • Photo: Amal Lavender

      Amal Lavender answered on 2 Feb 2021:


      According to European Space Agency – The Universe is thought to consist of three types of substance: normal matter, ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’.
      Normal matter consists of the atoms that make up stars, planets, human beings and every other visible object in the Universe.
      In the currently popular model of the Universe, 70% is thought to be dark energy, 25% dark matter and 5% normal matter. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Extreme_space/What_is_the_Universe_made_of

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