Matter-dominated era

The matter-dominated era was the epoch in the evolution of the Universe that began when the radiation-dominated era ended, when the Universe was about 47,000 years old. Although it was often said that we still live in the matter-dominated era, it is more correct to say that when the Universe was about 9.8 billion years old, this era ended and was replaced by the dark-energy-dominated era. This change of the perspective occurred when the cosmological constant or dark energy was first observed in the late 1990s.