2. What Do We Mean by âCompositionâ? For the purposes of this talk, we are concerned with the chemical elements that make up the universe, sometimes called the âbaryonic matterâ (protons and neutrons are baryons). There is evidence that all the baryonic matter is actually less than 30% of the matter in the Universe. The rest is Dark Matter. More precisely, we are interested in the proportion of all the baryonic matter that is in the form of each element. This is called the elemental abundance. There are two types of abundances that are sometimes discussed: abundance by number and abundance by mass.