We now have the most accurate measurement to date of the total amount of matter in our universe. A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal[1] seems to indicate that our universe is composed of 31% matter, with the rest being dark energy.
And of that 31% of matter, 80% of that is dark matter, which we are still searching for. This means that the "ordinary matter" that is known within the Standard Model of elementary particle and that makes up you and I is only about 6.2% of the entire matter+energy of our universe. The remaining 93.8% are made up of "dark" stuff, i.e. dark energy and dark matter.
This means that we still do not know the nature of a huge portion of what makes up our universe. Would it be nice to be alive 50 or 100 years from now when we know more about these things then (hopefully!).
Z.
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aba619
1 comment:
I think there's a clue in and The Foundation of the General theory of Relativity, Zapper. Einstein said “the energy of the gravitational field shall act gravitatively in the same way as any other kind of energy”. Gravitational field energy causes gravity, and it isn’t made up of WIMPs, or axions, or sterile neutrinos. It's spatial energy. The energy of space itself. It's as if the space down near a planet is "denser" than the space a long way from the planet. Einstein also described a gravitational field as a place where space was "neither homogeneous not isotropic", and said things like the difference between space and matter shall fade away. Now think about the expansion of the universe and the raisin-cake analogy: space expands between the galaxies but not within. So every galaxy is embedded in a region of denser space, and the energy of space shall act gravitatively in the same way as any other kind of energy.
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