Think of the universe as a painting. There’s the image made in paint, and the surface it was painted on. The canvas.
The stars, the planets, the gasses, the matter and energy and even the space between are the paint. What’s the canvas? Is there a canvas? Would the canvas follow the same rules as the paint?
The ‘canvas’ which everything else resides upon is currently thought to be Quantum Fields: Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe - with David Tong. (A 1h video by a theoretical particle physicist that’s in layman’s term, very educational and downright LOL funny at times. Well worth your time!)
A Field is something that permeates the entire universe. There’s thought to be a field for every particle in the Standard Model. Electron, photon, charm, up, etc. A particle forms when the field is excited, and these particles interact with each other to form the universe.