What Is the Universe Made Of?

Question

Every once in a while, cosmologists are dragged, kicking and screaming, into a universe much more unsettling than they had any reason to expect. In the 1500s and 1600s, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton showed that Earth is just one of many planets orbiting one of many stars, destroying the comfortable Medieval notion of a closed and tiny cosmos. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble showed that our universe is constantly expanding and evolving, a finding that eventually shattered the idea that the universe is unchanging and eternal. And in the past few decades, cosmologists have discovered that the ordinary matter that makes up stars and galaxies and people is less than 5% of everything there is. Grappling with this new understanding of the cosmos, scientists face one overriding question: What is the universe made of?

Answer 1

About 96% or so of our known universe is made of dark matter/energy. We use matter/energy to stress that energy and matter are interchangeable from E = mc^2 and all its ramifications. Only in 2006 did we first actually "see" dark matter when some of it was seen to glow around two colliding clusters of galaxies.

Check this out...

"Dark matter is fundamentally different from normal matter. It is invisible using modern telescopes because it gives off no light or heat, and it appears to interact with other matter only gravitationally. In contrast, luminous matter is everything commonly associated with the universe: the galaxies, stars, gas and planets. "[See source.]

Dark matter/energy was first proposed when it was noted that visible matter/energy was insufficient in galaxies to account for the fact they did not fly apart under their own centrifugal forces. Something, like gravity, was holding them together with centripetal force.

But when all the visible mass/energy was added up, the resulting forces of gravity were way below what they had to be to keep the galaxies from flying apart. Since no one could see the needed extra mass, they called it "dark" matter.

String/M theory (more a hypothesis than a theory) posits that all mass/energy is made of infinitely thin, very short vibrating strings. And how these strings appear in our 4D universe depends solely on the frequency they vibrate. One of the particles predicted by string/M theory is the graviton, which is the messenger quantum that carries the attraction signal from mass to mass.

Perhaps, dark matter/energy is the graviton or some similar, yet unpredicted, messenger packet of energy. This is just a WAG; as far as I know, no one has yet postulated what dark matter/energy is; they've only just recently figured out what it does and, since 2006, that it's real.

Answer 2

You ask a great question. The current, scientifically correct answer is "dark matter/dark energy", as eyeonthescreen said. But what exactly is dark matter or dark energy? Cosmologists have inferred its existence because they cannot account for - given the current scientific understanding of physics - the fact that the galaxies, and the universe as a whole, just doesn't seem to have enough matter to create enough gravity to hold it all together. In my mind, is is just as likely that there is some form of consciousness far above our understanding that holds it all together.

Answer 3

The universe is a closed dynamic value evolution and replication system. All forms move from dense matter to ethereal essence via energy displacement governed by principles of intelligence that focus the will of awareness into a system of value reproduction and value evolution. The state of Godhood and total awareness is at the end of the evolutionary cycle of the universe and the state of density and sleep is at the beginning of the cycle of creation.

Creation is the qualities or quality of Godhood focused by the will of divine principle into a collection of assembling mental units of thought. This process continues to disassemble and reassemble mental units of thought for the purpose of achieving advanced orders of thinking that will result in evolving the sleeping dense matter to a point where it will cross barriers separating dimensions of creation until all creation is transformed into the absolute state of God.

Our biggest hang-up in civilization is that we insist on separating the ideas of GOD and EVOLUTION. Our sciences will not do us true justice until it drops this separation, and our religions will not serve the truth until they drop it.

Answer 4

See the references and related links for the subatomic particles we think we know of. Include dark matter, dark energy, zero point energy, and the Higgs Field, along with all forms of energy. Then there's the spacetime that contains it all.

If you cut and pasted this question from somewhere else, intellectual honesty demands that you cite the reference.

Answer 5

Protons, neutrons and electrons, except for the electron subatomic particles make up the other two.

Answer 6

Matter, anti-matter and energy. Who ever said the elements is a prick; that IS matter.

Answer 7

Matter, anti-matter, and the elements.

Answer 8

Guts, and black stuff.