Approxiverse
Physics

What the universe is made of

Sort all the mass and energy there is by weight, magnify the smallest slice, and repeat — the planets turn up five levels down, in the crumbs.

Almost all of the universe is two things nobody has ever handled. Dark energy, whatever it is that pushes the expansion along, takes about 69% of the mass and energy there is. Dark matter, which shows up only in the way galaxies hold themselves together, takes just over a quarter. Everything that has ever been seen, touched, built or breathed is made of atoms, and atoms are the 4.9% left over.

That 4.9% is mostly hydrogen, spread so thinly between the galaxies that a laboratory would call it a decent vacuum. Only about one atom in thirteen is inside a galaxy.

Everything familiar is in the leftovers

It keeps happening on the way down. Of the matter a galaxy has gathered, most is stars that are still burning, and the remainder holds the dead and the failed ones. Of those, most are white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, and the remainder is rock, metal, ice and dust. Planets are in there, somewhere behind the dust.

At every level the leading component takes between 57% and 92% of it, and the thing worth looking at next is always in what is left. Five magnifications down, every solid thing in the universe comes to about four ten-thousandths of a percent of the whole.

What the visualisation does

Five bars, each one the smallest interesting slice of the bar above it stretched back out to full width. Every percentage is a share of the bar it sits in rather than of the universe, and the magnification is stated at each jump. The last of them blows up a sliver by a factor of nearly two hundred.

Solving…
Each panel takes the marked slice of the one above it and stretches it back out to full width.

Two independent routes agree here. Run the chain end to end and planets come out at roughly 0.05% of the mass tied up in stars. In our own system, where the Sun can be weighed directly, the planets are 0.13% of it: the same answer to within a factor of three, one from galaxy surveys and one from the back garden.

Moons, asteroids and comets are not measured across the sky. They are scaled from Solar System ratios and are order of magnitude only. Massive neutrinos are left out of the top panel, because the fit those figures come from assumes their weight rather than measuring it.