Most of It Is Missing

Add up every star, every planet, every cloud of gas and dust Every galaxy you can point a telescope at and trust That's still less than one twentieth of everything that's out there The rest is somewhere you can't see, somewhere you can't stare

Most of it is missing, or at least missing from view Something massive holds galaxies together that we can't see through We call it dark matter, simply because we know it's there By the way it pulls and shoves, invisible everywhere

Galaxies spin too fast to hold themselves apart Unless something invisible is holding the outer stars Something with mass, something with gravity's pull But no light, no glow, nothing visible at all

Most of it is missing, or at least missing from view Something massive holds galaxies together that we can't see through We've mapped its shadow by the way it bends the light Around it like a lens, though it never once takes flight

Then there's a second missing thing, even stranger than the first The whole universe expanding, and the expansion getting worse Getting faster every year, pulling galaxies apart We call that dark energy, and we're still just at the start

Most of it is missing, or at least missing from view The visible universe is a rounding error, plain and true Everyone you've ever loved, every planet, every sun Add it all together, and it's barely anyone

Most of it is missing, or at least missing from view Something massive holds galaxies together that we can't see through It's an honest map of how much we've found so far on this path No failure of the telescope, no failure of the math

Most of it is missing, and that's cause for wonder, plain and simple It's a reminder that the story's only just begun to unfold at all Twenty thousand years of looking up, and we've mapped one twentieth of the sky There's a whole universe of missing left to go find out why