Composition of the universe: According to the latest observational evidence, ordinary matter, including stars and planets, only make up a tiny fraction of the universe (5%). The rest is the elusive dark matter (25%) and dark energy(70%).
Here's a question for you. What is the stuff that makes up the majority of the universe? Stars and galaxies? Hydrogen gas? Planets like ours? Nope. It's none of them. Here's a hint: we have absolutely no idea.
For more than 75 years, we've known the cosmos has been running away from us; caught up in an ongoing expansion, with galactic clusters edging away from each other like so many raisins in an inflating cosmological cupcake.
That's hard enough to wrap one's head around. But out in the remote reaches of the universe – beyond the familiar constellations and our local group of galaxies – cosmologists now tell us they see hints that the universe is undergoing a violent tug of war between gravity and a mysterious dark energy.
How did we come to this startling conclusion? It all began in 1915 when Albert Einstein, then at the University of Berlin, came up with his theory of general relativity.
His equations pointed to the fact that the natural state of the universe was one of flux: either expanding or contracting. But since that had yet to be confirmed observationally, he tried to make his equations fit the data at hand.
As a result, his 'cosmological constant' was born, in 1917. This proposition posits that there must be a repulsive 'negative pressure' to counteract the 'positive pressure' of gravity, in order to fit with the assumed static universe of the day.
However, by 1929, Edwin Hubble's groundbreaking observations at California's Mount Wilson Observatory had shown that the wavelength of light from distant galaxies is shifted further into the red portion of the spectrum compared with the light from nearer galaxies.
Even more astounding: there appeared to be a strong linear relationship between the distance and shift into the red.
The implication was staggering. If the light had been stretched, or 'redshifted', through the Doppler effect – the same distorting effect that causes an ambulance siren to rise in pitch when approaching or drop as it recedes – it could only mean one thing: everything in the universe was hurtling away from our humble Milky Way, and the further away it was, the faster it fled.
Either there was something uniquely repulsive – physically or figuratively – about our home, or the entire universe was undergoing explosive expansion.
Thus, in a 1932 joint paper by Einstein and Dutch academic Willem de Sitter, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, they noted that since the universe had been observed to be expanding – a cosmological constant was no longer necessary.
Furthermore, other cosmologists noted that if the universe was getting bigger, this implied it had been smaller in the past. If you went back far enough, the entire universe would have originated from a very small point: the Big Bang. The big question was whether the expansion would continue indefinitely, or whether it would slow or possibly reverse, leading to a 'Big Crunch'.
While Einstein quickly dropped the cosmological constant from his equations and brushed it aside, Sir Arthur Eddington did not. Eddington, a professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England, was prescient enough to observe in his 1934 lectures that, should Einstein's "cosmical repulsion" get the upper hand, then the universe will go on expanding forever.
However, Eddington lacked the means to prove Einstein's earlier ideas about a cosmological constant. Consequently, the idea of a cosmological constant was relegated to the fringes, occasionally rearing its head at cosmological conferences through the years, but largely cast aside as what Einstein called his "greatest blunder".
Dark Matter and Energy
Personally, I think Dark Energy is the souls of every living thing that ever died anywhere in the Universe. That's just my theory, but it makes as much sense as any other guess, which is what all those scientists are doing. We know living things are make of energy. That energy has to go somewhere when things die---Why not space?
Souls?
No, it does make any sense. Souls are not "matter."
Dark Forces
So we live in a 5% reality. What if heaven and God is dark energy and dark matter?