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The Visible Universe

The universe is made up of mostly invisible substances like dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter accounts for 25% of the universe's mass while dark energy accounts for 70%. Dark energy is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe and its effects are growing stronger over time. Scientists have no clear explanation for what dark energy is but theories include that it is a new type of energy fluid filling the universe or a property of space itself.

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simran gupta
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61 views

The Visible Universe

The universe is made up of mostly invisible substances like dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter accounts for 25% of the universe's mass while dark energy accounts for 70%. Dark energy is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe and its effects are growing stronger over time. Scientists have no clear explanation for what dark energy is but theories include that it is a new type of energy fluid filling the universe or a property of space itself.

Uploaded by

simran gupta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The visible universe—including Earth, the sun, other stars, and galaxies—is made of protons,

neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms. Perhaps one of the most surprising
discoveries of the 20th century was that this ordinary, or baryonic, matter makes up less than
5 percent of the mass of the universe. The rest of the universe appears to be made of a
mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter (25 percent) and a force that repels gravity
known as dark energy (70 percent).

Expanding Universe-Dark energy is even more mysterious, and its discovery in the
1990s was a complete shock to scientists. Previously, physicists had assumed that
the attractive force of gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe over
time. But when two independent teams tried to measure the rate of deceleration,
they found that the expansion was actually speeding up. Scientists now think that
the accelerated expansion of the universe is driven by a kind of repulsive force
generated by "empty" space. What's more, the force seems to be growing stronger as
the universe expands. For lack of a better name, scientists call this mysterious force
dark energy. Unlike for dark matter, scientists have no plausible explanation for
dark energy. According to one idea, dark energy is a fifth and previously unknown
type of fundamental force called quintessence, which fills the universe like a fluid.

According to Einstein, the constant would be a repulsive force that counteracts


gravity, keeping the universe from collapsing in on itself. Einstein later discarded
the idea when astronomical observations revealed that the universe was expanding,
calling the cosmological constant.

Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy
fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the
expansion of the universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy.

Scientists have not yet observed dark matter directly. It doesn't interact with
baryonic matter and it's completely invisible to light and other forms of
electromagnetic radiation, making dark matter impossible to detect with current
instruments. But scientists are confident it exists because of the gravitational effects
it appears to have on galaxies and galaxy clusters.Scientists have a few ideas for
what dark matter might be. One leading hypothesis is that dark matter consists of
exotic particles that don't interact with normal matter or light but that still exert a
gravitational pull.
Now that we see the expansion of the universe is accelerating, adding in dark energy as
a cosmological constant could neatly explain how space-time is being stretched apart.
But that explanation still leaves scientists clueless as to why the strange force exists in
the first place.

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