Only five percent of the universe is visible. What is the rest made up of? The visible universe—including Earth, the sun, other stars, and galaxies—is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms.
Humans, along with everything on Earth and everything we have ever discovered in space, constitute less than 5 percent of the universe. This type of matter, also known as “ordinary matter,” is minuscule when compared to dark matter, which, when combined with dark energy, forms the remaining 95 percent of the universe.
Only 5% of the universe is visible from Earth. 68% of the universe is dark energy and 27% is dark matter. Both of these are invisible, even with a telescope, which means we are only able to see 5% of the universe.
We're looking back in time the further out we go because it takes time for light to travel to us. So the furthest out we can see is about 46.5 billion light years away, which is crazy, but it also means you can look back into the past and try to figure out how the universe formed, which again, is what cosmologists do.
Observable Cosmos
The remaining 4% of the Universe is composed of everything we can see with our eyes and telescopes. This includes all intergalactic and interstellar gas and dust, stars, planets, and life. Before dark matter was discovered in the 1930s, this 4% was our entire Universe.
All the material we can see is just a small fraction of the universe. The rest, a full 95 percent, is invisible and mysterious. These are the enigmatic dark matter and dark energy.
The size of the whole universe is unknown, and it might be infinite in extent. Some parts of the universe are too far away for the light emitted since the Big Bang to have had enough time to reach Earth or space-based instruments, and therefore lie outside the observable universe.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
The light that travels the longest gets stretched by the greatest amount, and the object that emitted that light is now at a greater distance because the universe is expanding. We can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away precisely because of the expanding universe.
As it stands, the universe is the largest object that we are aware of. There is nothing larger, and everything we can smell, hear, taste, touch, or see is a part of it.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
We know only five per cent of the universe. The remaining 95 per cent is still a mystery – an unknown universe of new particles and forces awaits discovery.
The part of the universe we can observe from Earth is filled more or less uniformly with galaxies extending in every direction as far as we can see - more than 10 billion light-years, or about 6 billion trillion miles.
On an astronomical scale, plasma is common. The Sun is composed of plasma, fire is plasma, fluorescent and neon lights contain plasma. "99.9 percent of the Universe is made up of plasma," says Dr.
Together, dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe.
Thanks to the expansion of space, this so-called co-moving distance is approximately 45 billion lightyears, and anything beyond this limit is unobservable to us because not enough time has elapsed since the birth of the Universe for light from these remote regions to reach our telescopes.
It's because the space between any two points — like us and the object we're observing — expands with time. The farthest object we've ever seen has had its light travel towards us for 13.4 billion years; we're seeing it as it was just 407 million years after the Big Bang, or 3% of the Universe's present age.
We are able to see the farthest galaxy almost 13.8 billion light years away. The scientists have estimated their current location, due to the expansion of the universe as 46.5 billion light years away, hence the diameter of the visible universe is 93 billion light years.
The most distant object ever seen from Earth may have just been discovered. HD1 is an object estimated to lie around 13.3 billion light years away from our planet, placing it in an era when many chemical elements were yet to form. If confirmed, it is more than two billion light years beyond the current record holder.
Five years on a ship traveling at 99 percent the speed of light (2.5 years out and 2.5 years back) corresponds to roughly 36 years on Earth. When the spaceship returned to Earth, the people onboard would come back 31 years in their future--but they would be only five years older than when they left.
A light-year is the distance a beam of light travels in a single Earth year, which equates to approximately 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers). On the scale of the universe, measuring distances in miles or kilometers is cumbersome given the exceedingly large numbers being discussed.
Constant Speed
So what does this sentence really mean? Surprisingly, the answer has nothing to do with the actual speed of light, which is 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second) through the "vacuum" of empty space.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
Scientists now consider it unlikely the universe has an end – a region where the galaxies stop or where there would be a barrier of some kind marking the end of space.
The Beyond is an unobservable space outside the Multiverse. It is the remnants of the Second Cosmos and is inhabited by the Beyonders.