Universe

Universe

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image shows some of the most remote galaxies visible with present technology, each consisting of billions of stars. The image's area of sky is very small – equivalent in size to one tenth of a full moon.
Age	13.799 ± 0.021 billion years
Diameter	At least 91 billion light-years (28 billion parsecs)
Mass (ordinary matter)	At least 1053 kg
Average density	4.5 x 10−31 g/cm3
Average temperature	2.72548 K
Main Contents	Ordinary (baryonic) matter (4.9%) Dark matter (26.8%) Dark energy (68.3%)
Shape	Flat with only a 0.4% margin of error

The Universe is all of time and space and its contents. It includes planets, moons, minor planets, stars, galaxies, the contents of intergalactic space, and all matter and energy. The size of the entire Universe is unknown.

The earliest scientific models of the Universe were developed by ancient Greek and Indian philosophers and were geocentric, placing the Earth at the center of the Universe. Over the centuries, more precise astronomical observations led Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) to develop the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. In developing the law of universal gravitation, Sir Isaac Newton (NS: 1643–1727) built upon Copernicus's work as well as observations by Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Johannes Kepler's (1571–1630) laws of planetary motion.

Further observational improvements led to the realization that our Solar System is located in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of many galaxies in the Universe. It is assumed that galaxies are distributed uniformly and the same in all directions, meaning that the Universe has neither an edge nor a center. Discoveries in the early 20th century have suggested that the Universe had a beginning and that it is expanding at an increasing rate. The majority of mass in the Universe appears to exist in an unknown form called dark matter.