Energy is abundant and seems to be wasted: cataclysmic episodes of immense power are frequent in galaxies and stars. And as there can be hundreds of thousands of millions of them in any galaxy, some will be new, emerging from clouds of interstellar dust and gas, among convulsions and readjustments, while others are in their final stages, imploding and exploding, expulsing incandescent matter, particles, and radiation in a very beautiful but nightmarish spectacle. Group members also study brown dwarf stars near to the sun and Near-Earth Objects within our solar system. So once again, our cosmology is in upheaval. Scientists say that it exists as dark matter and dark energy. Interstellar gas, which is mostly just free elemental hydrogen and helium makes up most of the mass in the universe that can be directly measured. Yet, it makes up about 22 percent of the universe. This might well lead to readjustments of our concept of the Cosmos even greater than those we now have to make as a consequence of the Universe’s acceleration. An energy that produces anti-gravitational forces capable of resisting the foreseeable implosion, and with such enormous strength that it can accelerate the expansion of space. For example, in the concrete case of the sense of sight—we are, after all, practically blind, incapable of making out distant objects, and only capable of seeing an extremely limited band of wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum—we have been able to invent marvelous “prosthetic devices”, that is, telescopes. But in the latter case, what we see is a shift towards longer wavelengths (“red shift”). The View from the Centre of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. So now, the contribution of dark energy seems necessary to complete the density of the Universe as measured by the Cosmic Microwave Background. Much later, it became possible to detect anisotropies (directional dependence) in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and even though they are extremely small—around 0.00001%—they are full of information about the origins of the structure of the gigantic Cosmos that we see. Primitive man had a direct sense of the influence of the heavens on our lives, for he was in permanent contact with nature and totally dependant on the birth and death of the Sun, Moon, and stars that marked the rhythm of day and night, and of the seasons. In fact, the Big Bang happened at all points in space at the same time, not in any specific one, which is in keeping with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. And, in writing this overview, I have been sorely tempted to accompany each statement with the cluster of unanswered questions that envelop it. Most people imagine the Big Bang as some sort of enormous bomb that exploded at some point in space, pushing matter outwards because of pressure differences caused by that explosion. It is totally logical to think that if such energy represents more than three quarters of our Universe, it must have had an enormous influence on the latter’s entire evolution, determining its large-scale structure and the formation of galaxy cumuli. Although its size is hard to comprehend, investigating its structure and composition gives us a better understanding of its primary building blocks. Srianand, T. A., P. Petitjean, and C. Ledoux. If we consider the Universe to be everything that exists, from the smallest to the most gigantic entities, one way of showing their structure would be to make an inventory of all such elements and order them hierarchically in space. Another proposal that has already been formulated is that the acceleration observed is actually caused by time itself, which is gradually slowing down. The second-most-abundant "stuff" of the universe is something that no one has seen otherwise detected. 4). In the nearest parts of the Universe, we only find such prodigious activity in the smaller galaxies. Which makes its … We can retain this simplified image of a gigantic, violent Universe in accelerated expansion, with its matter—the ordinary matter of which we ourselves are made, and the dark matter—concentrated in islands full of action, pushed by gravity, uniformly steeped in dark energy, and bathed in electromagnetic radiation. The nuclei of active galaxies are regions of special interest that can be observed using infrared through X-rays as tracers of the unusual conditions there. Almost all the information we received from outer space comes in the form of electromagnetic radiation, and the first retrospective snapshot of the Universe comes from the Cosmic Microwave Background. On the other hand, the panorama could not be any more disheartening: despite our elegant scientific speculation, we do not have the slightest idea about the nature of 97% of what constitutes our Universe!