Question: What is the universe made of?

Thomas Biggans answered on 21 Jun 2016:

At the moment we think the universe is made up of three things: Atoms, Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Atoms we all know and love, they make up all the stuff we see, touch and manipulate in some way

Now for a long time we thought that was it but then we noticed that the stars weren’t moving around as they were supposed to according to the laws of physics. If there was some form of stuff that we couldn’t see that changed the gravity around these stars than that would explain why they are moving around the way they do so we decided this stuff existed and called it dark matter. Dark because we can’t see it matter because it changes gravity.

The other thing we noticed in the universe was that it keeps getting bigger and its getting bigger faster so we came up with the idea of dark energy which acts as the opposite to gravity it pushes everything away instead of pulling it together. Again dark because we can’t see it, energy because we’re not sure what it is we just know its some form of energy.

The crazy thing is that according to the calculations 73% of the universe is dark energy, 23% is dark matter and only 4% is atoms. So we can only see 4% of the stuff in the universe that’s why it looks so empty.