Most Abundant Elements in the Universe

About This Dataset

This chart shows the ten most abundant chemical elements in the universe by mass fraction. Hydrogen and helium, forged in the Big Bang, overwhelmingly dominate, while all heavier elements combined make up only about 2% of ordinary matter.

✨ AI Insight

The universe is almost entirely hydrogen (73.97%) and helium (24.02%), which together account for about 98% of all ordinary matter by mass. This overwhelming dominance traces back to Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which produced hydrogen and helium but almost nothing heavier. Every other element on this list, forged later inside stars, is comparatively rare: oxygen ranks third at just 1.04% and carbon fourth at 0.46%. From neon onward the values fall below 0.14%, with iron, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium and sulfur trailing at fractions of a percent. The steep gap between helium and oxygen, a factor of more than twenty, illustrates how scarce the elements of planets and life actually are on a cosmic scale.

Source: Abundance of the chemical elements

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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Hydrogen leads with 74 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 10 · median: 0.

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Gap in All Time: Hydrogen is 1681.1× larger than Sulfur.