The 'stuff' of the universe keeps changing | Hacker News Reader

The 'stuff' of the universe keeps changing

phys.org

76 pointsdnetesn18 comments

And yet, it has also been suggested that this periodic table only describes 4% of the mass in the universe:

"All the stars, planets and galaxies that can be seen today make up just 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is made of stuff astronomers can't see, detect or even comprehend."

https://www.space.com/11642-dark-matter-dark-energy-4-percen...

They should have mentioned this in the article, as it is an important qualifier.

All the things I've seen today make up just 4% of my apt building. The other 96% is made up of things I can't see, detect, or even comprehend.

Therefore this periodic table must only describe 4% of my apt building.

If your wrote your own periodic table, that would probably be true.

Do you mean to imply that dark matter is just regular matter we somehow can't see because it's too small or dark? Because they've thought of that (obviously), and it doesn't work.

They just need a really bright light!

Really, that is probably true. If we can give photons enough energy we can use them to discover all kinds of interesting science.

Dark matter is most likely the graviton flux that has been emanating from mass-energy since the big bang. It is literally the gravitational field itself. Gravitons are likely negative mass particles - this makes sense considering the zero total energy universe conjecture lauded by Hawking, Krauss, and others.

Interesting, can you point to a paper outlining this theory and how it matches all of the extensive observations that otherwise have supported the theory of dark matter?

http://vixra.org/abs/1708.0258

Do you have one printed in a reputable peer reviewed journal?

https://arxiv.org/abs/0807.5130

Arxiv is also not a peer-reviewed journal. (Although it is reputable.)

I guess knowledge is only accepted when it plays a banjo these days...

Carl Sagan popularized one wonderful aspect of this in his 1980 series Cosmos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

One of many great quotes from the series: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

Is there a continued trend toward greater complexity/mass of elements? What atomic materials are expected to be left when heat death comes and claims it all?

Everything in this[0] list is thought to be stable. The rest will eventually decay into those. If proton decay exists then everything will eventually decay into something lighter such as pions and positrons (we are talking 10^36-10^43 years). See also [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclides#Theoretically...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Just photons zipping around in the far far future.

And since photons are timeless, they're already there.

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