• Question: What is the universe made from?

    Asked by to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Hey,

      some of the universe is made of tiny particles, including protons, neutrons and electrons. Those make up the elements like oxygen and hydrogen we are familiar with. There is a lot of dark matter, which are smaller particles than those I have mentioned above. The large majority (more than half) is made up from dark energy, but we don’t really know what that’s made of.

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      There’s an awful lot of hydrogen up there, of all the materials we can find in the universe, hydrogen seems to be by far the most common, which shouldn’t be too surprising as it’s the simplest element that can be made out of protons and electrons (and sometimes neutrons for slightly different types of hydrogen)

      But a really big chunk of the universe appears to be made of “dark matter”. We can’t detect it (hence the name) but the way stars, nebulae and galaxies move about and interact with each other shows that there’s stuff there affecting them with gravity and such, only we can’t see it. All dark matter might be the same stuff, or it might be a load of different elements we’ve never encountered before, or it could be something else entirely. We just don’t know because it won’t show up on any device we look with, except for how it affects things we CAN see.

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