• Question: what is the universe made from?

    Asked by miacorn to Dave, Ed, Guido, Hugh, Stef on 16 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Dave Bond

      Dave Bond answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Cosmological observations indicate that most of the Universe is made up of invisible substances that do not emit electromagnetic radiation (light being one of the electromagnetic radiation wavelengths) so, we cannot detect them directly through telescopes or similar instruments. We detect them only through their gravitational effects, which makes them very difficult to study. These mysterious substances are known as ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’.

      No one realy knows at the moment but there is more to the universe than what we observe as the stuff that makes up everything.

    • Photo: Ed Rial

      Ed Rial answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hi Mia

      That’s a really complicated question! Because there is nothing outside of the universe, the universe is literally made up of everything, but we don’t know for sure what that everything is!

      The stuff we do know about are the so called fundamental particles: leptons, bosons and quarks. Each lepton and quark has an anti-particle (anti-matter)

      The leptons are:
      electron,
      electron neutrino
      muon,
      mu netrino,
      tau particle,
      tau neutrino.

      They each have anti-particles

      the quarks are:
      up,
      down,
      strange,
      charm,
      bottom,
      top.

      And they each have anti-particles

      Bosons – these are particles that cause forces (like gravity).
      photon
      W boson
      Z boson
      gluon
      graviton
      Higgs

      Only the W boson has an antiparticle.

      So those are the 31 things we have seen make up the universe (well, we haven’t actually seen a graviton, it has just been theorised).

      There are lots of other things that have been theorised to make the universe make sense, like superstrings, axions, dark matter and dark energy, but none of those have been proved to exist. This is why we have big particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to help us discover these things!

      Particle physics can start to look a lot like biology when you get into it – lots of different creatures to learn about!

      Ed

    • Photo: Hugh Harvey

      Hugh Harvey answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      Everything is made from sub-atomic particles, which we have quite limited understanding of. There may even be other dimensions which we can’t see, and we might just actually be a shadow of a higher dimension – freaky!

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