Licia Verde, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the varied composition of the universe, including dark energy and dark matter, as well as how the universe formed and how it continues to evolve.
Scientists leading the project hope to be able to recreate conditions immediately after the big bang and provide answers to key questions on the composition of the universe.
Dark matter makes up 26.5 percent of the matter-energy composition of the universe; the rest is dark energy (73 percent) and "ordinary" visible matter (0.5 percent).
Reference is made in this article to the chemical composition of the universe, but most of the observations refer to our own and neighbouring galaxies.
A discussion of how the present chemical composition of the universe has arisen brings to light two distinct questions: what was the initial chemical composition and what alterations have occurred since creation.
Their chemical composition, however, is fairly uniform; it corresponds to the composition of the universe in general in that approximately 90 percent of the constituent atoms are hydrogen and nearly all the rest are helium, with oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, and the other elements together making up about two atoms per thousand.
From studies of the CMB and other measurements, cosmologists have also deduced the composition of the universe.
Prof Carlos Frenk at Durham University, working with the Virgo Consortium, now has data suggesting that our understanding of the formation and composition of the Universe is incomplete.
Our results are robust to a variety of controls and in particular to changes over the business cycle in the composition of the universe of firms (due to entry and exit phenomena) and of the workforce.
"It's our biggest opportunity in a generation to find out what's the next step, where do we go from here and how do we explain the things we don't understand about the composition of the Universe".
In 2003, researchers working with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite obtained a more-detailed map of the CMB, which allowed them to precisely determine the age and composition of the universe (ScienceNOW, 11 February 2003).
