8 Mind-Bending Unanswered Questions About The Universe

4. Where’s The Rest Of It?

We should probably get some posters made up or something, because ninety-six percent of the universe is missing.

When scientists tried to tot up the sum total of all the matter and the energy in the universe, they found that they were coming up significantly short.

Dark energy makes up the largest part of this mysterious hidden universe, with scientists estimating that accounts for around 74% of the energy density of the universe. It is essentially an invisible force, a kind of "anti-gravity" that pushes and pulls everything apart.

The other side of the coin, dark matter, is thought to make up 22% of the matter in the universe. The only problem is that it doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum and we have no way of detecting it, we can only infer its presence from its effect on the rest of the universe that we can see, namely the gravitational lensing caused by the warping of spacetime.

To be clear, you need to get the image of an inky kind of matter spread out across the universe, there is nothing necessarily "dark" about dark matter, it's just a placeholder name because we don't have the foggiest gist of any of its qualities (plus the whole not-interacting-with-light thing I guess).

For all we know, the aliens could all be living in the 96% of the universe that we can't detect, with eyes that can see it in all its glory. They might also be pondering the existence of the missing 4% of their universe and wondering just what it could be.