The Universe Is Slowly Dying
An international team of astronomers studying more than 200,000 galaxies has measured the energy generated within a large portion of space more precisely than ever before. This represents the most comprehensive assessment of the energy output of the nearby Universe. They confirm that the energy produced in a section of the Universe today is only about half what it was two billion years ago and find that this fading is occurring across all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the far infrared. The Universe is slowly dying.
The study involves many of the world’s most powerful telescopes, including ESO’s VISTA and VST survey telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Supporting observations were made by two orbiting space telescopes operated by NASA (GALEX and WISE) and another belonging to the European Space Agency (Herschel).
Source & further reading:
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1533/
#nasa #space #ESO #ESA
On the bright side, it has an unfathomably long half-life.
ReplyDeleteSoon we'll need another big bang to get the cycle of life jump started again. I won't be around for it, but it is good to know a next generation will be around... at least for a brief moment in the future...
ReplyDeleteI agree Duane, dying or taking a breath. All in the universe is cyclic in nature. The Big Bang will either run out of steam and slowly collapse on itself until compression gets so great another Big Bang occurs, or it will expand to the point of the Big Pop; into a larger universe expelling all of its current energy and matter into a said super universe creating a new universe within. That said, in either case from our perspective our universe will die. But on a much larger scale, it will be more akin to breathing or recycling and life, not necessarily as we know it, will go on!
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