Question: what is the universe made from

Chris Werner answered on 8 Nov 2017:

That is a question which still funnily enough remains unanswered! Its also the question why most astrophysicists have jobs!! What is really out there? And of what is it all made? Without this understanding it is impossible to come to any firm conclusions about how the universe evolved.

We of course have all the elements and rocks, gases that make up planets and stars, which can be termed as matter, everything we can see. But that makes up a very small percentage of what the universe is actually made of and indeed the matter in the universe. About 20-30% of all the matter in the universe is ‘regular’ matter. The rest is dark matter (got to love astrophysics and their ‘imaginative’ naming conventions! 🙂 ). But it gets better, because only 20% of the universe is made of matter, dark and regular. The rest is just energy called (you guessed it!) dark energy. All this dark stuff is invisible, and we still don’t fully understand what it is yet!