#0020 · 🌌 Cosmic Oddities
Everything You Can See — Stars, Planets, People — Is Less Than 5% of the Universe
Ordinary matter made of atoms is just a sliver of the universe's contents — the rest is dark matter and dark energy.
Stars, planets, people, air, every atom ever measured in a lab — all of it together adds up to only about 5% of the universe's total content.
About 27% is dark matter — something with mass that exerts a gravitational pull on galaxies, but neither emits nor absorbs light, so it has never been directly observed.
The remaining nearly 68% is dark energy — an even more mysterious force, inferred from the observation that the universe's expansion is speeding up instead of slowing down.
In other words: all the physics, chemistry, and biology we've ever learned describes a minority of what's actually out there — the rest is still waiting to be explained.
Sources
- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
This fact is based on generally available knowledge, not a single, citable source. See how we approach verification.
Krulicza Nora
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