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Study: the Universe Has Almost Stopped Making New Stars
SternisheFan sends this quote from Wired:
"An international team of astronomers used three telescopes — the UK Infrared Telescope and the Subaru Telescope, both in Hawaii, and Chile's Very Large Telescope — to study trends in star formation, from the earliest days of the universe. Extrapolating their findings has revealed that half of all the stars that have ever existed were created between 9 and 11 billion years ago, with the other half created in the years since. That means the rate at which new stars are born has dropped off massively, to the extent that (if this trend continues) 95 percent of all the stars that this universe will ever see have already been born. Several studies have looked at specific time 'epochs', but the different methods used by each study has restricted the ability to compare their findings and discern a fuller model of how stars have evolved over the course of the entire universe's lifespan."
Well can't we just set up a star-making machine to replenish fallen stars and create a steady stream of new ones?
Nah, just kidding.
They stopped making new movies, about 2002.
Now it's only remakes, re-boots, TV re-imaginings, and films based on children's toys.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I guess that now 'they stopped making it' then the price will only go up!
Maybe it just doesn't find it creativly fulfilling anymore.
Maybe we should just wait for another 9 to 11 billion years to see if they're right?
...now we call then idols
--Toby Mac
Why we dont find any life out theere, the golden age of the universe might just be long passed. Might have been teeming at some point. Sorry no Star-Trek possible anymore.
I've often casually thought about star formation when viewing images of planetary nebula like the Orion nebula. The captions/descriptions almost always mention that the nebula was the remnants of a star, and then point out areas of new star formation. But the math never really added up, since one nebula would have a bunch of stars and no explanation is usually given.
I guess that's just a round about way of saying that I subconsciously expected the findings here to be true. It's nice that someone went to the effort to schedule the telescope time and document this.
I for one welcome our new entropic overlords. No (stellar) news is good news, right?
Half 9-11 billion years in age, half since, i.e. 12-14, hmmmm...something isn't right. Looks like little or no decrease.
It should be decreasing, logically, but not by that argument.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...that Romney didn't get elected.
I would expect this to be the case because of the tendencies of large stars to die quickly and a steadily increasing population of small stars that can live extremely long lives. I think the universe has a bright future with small dim stars.
I guess it's time for the Universe to pay a visit to the fertility clinic? All that stellar sperm has gotten flung out all over the place instead of being deposited where it can do some baby-making. Somebody needs to teach the Universe how to stop pulling out and ejaculating all over the place.
Is this the result of English as a third language or mental disease? I'm thinking the latter....
Alpha particles from hydrogen atoms? Perhaps what the author neglected to say "Alpha particles from the proton-proton chain fusion involving hydrogen atoms."
Once hydrogen and helium are fused into heavier elements, would that not end star formation?
FTFY
They're all hiding out in a black hole waiting for all those slacker main sequence dwarfs to die off. Damn pirates never contribute anything to the interstellar medium. Eliminate capital gains taxes now!
...we haven't been around long enough to really know this.
I still like to think of it as the equivalent of a numbers station.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
....the god particle.. Quantum Physics and the observer effect.... god stopped producing...
...got to love those over-reaching science publication headlines. When I was young, we were all told we were supposed to be living in space colonies by now. If the Russians didn't kill us all first with laser-guided hydrogen bombs.
Instead we got Facebook, Twitter, fart apps on the iPhone, and World of Warcraft -- kind of the same thing really.
The Fermi Paradox assumes quite a few things which may not be true, such as interstellar travel being practical or desirable, life and intelligence being similar to our own, the fact we could actually spot it with our current techology (or that it would desire to be seen), and that artifacts of past civilizations would actually last for the millions of years between said civilization and our own.
We are barely able to start seeing extrasolar planets. The idea that "if it's out there, we would have seen it" seems a bit silly for any number of reasons. For instance, noticing, here on earth, the tiny blip in time a civilization that might use radio waves seems unlikely. People who subscribe to the technological singularity might assume that any civilization with high enough technology would be incomprehensible to us; think of us trying to tune into a radio show (or look for smoke signals) when they're using the internet. I think the article above lists a few more.
Star Trek may well not be possible as you say; that doesn't mean something better isn't.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
This looks like someone tried to generate an automatic "5 Insightful" comment generator and failed miserably.
The only ways to get off this rock are to understand ecologies well enough to be able to build a sustainable large-scale ecology with enough complexity to maintain human life, or to understand human minds well enough to upload ourselves into robots. To do the former, humans need to be Not Dead Yet, which means we have to be able to understand ecologies well enough not to poison ourselves before we've got a bunch of starships. So far, we haven't been able to build little model terrariums like Biosphere 2 without cheating, and we won't be able to build a colony on Mars (where you've got some resources to cheat with), much less outer space, until we can do one on Earth.
So if you want to get off the planet, you've got to fix the planet first. Or, like, do the robot upload dance, and you're not getting me inside one of those things any time soon.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
for some reason this makes me incredibly sad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
This is what happens when God allowed the star makers to unionized. They get lazy and production drops.
I'll be using this news to tell me wife why I'm just sitting on the couch and not doing house chores. I want minimize my contribution to the heat death of the universe.
INAS and haven't RTFA yet but it would seem to me that this shouldn't be a shock to anyone. This may be a simplistic way of looking at it but I give it a shot.
If the universe is expanding it would seem that the ratio of globular clusters and the like where many stars are born to the amount of space from expansion would somewhat dilute the gravity needed to fuel star formation. So as the universe expands the effect on gravity on objects decreases and there for star formation grinds to a halt. Then again... I may be way off course here so off to RTFA..
Do you know how much those things *cost* to build new. Jeez.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Based on the number of stars in the universe according to some random website I found, there are 5 x 10^21 stars yet to be born!
Sudently I feel a cold chill down my back I look at the haven and said. "Winter is coming!"
Time to start panicing!
due to lack of demand and whole entire Margathea went into Chapter 11 is not news to some of us.
...It's full of old stars.
If what we "See" is information that's billions of years old, and any new information will take the same amount of time to reach us, how can they extrapolate what's happening now with any certainty? For all we know, the creation and expulsion of stars from whatever the center of the universe is comes in waves, and new waves of stellar bodies are created every day, but we won't know for a few billion years?
In the early universe, there wouldn't have been enough heavy elements to make cool stuff like life.
It took a couple of generations of massive stars blowing themselves up before things got interesting.
Study: the Universe Has Almost Stopped Making New Stars
Is there any hope at all, that this will lead to the demise of American Idol?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Okay, well, 8 years ago. But now I'm clearly going to have to find something else to do.
Kind of a toss-up between turnip farming, long-haul trucking, and niche porn*, I suppose.
*Turnip-farmer porn, long-haul trucker porn, turnip-farming long-haul trucker porn...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Title is self-explanatory for those that have seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjc0n4MiaUQ
We're running out of stars.... Get 'em while they're hot!
Supermassive blackholes contain plenty of energy waiting to be extracted through the Penrose process.
If we needed stars for some reason maybe we could manufacture some.
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names Of God, 1953
licet differant, aequabitur
95 percent of all the stars that this universe will ever see have already been born
And since, based on all the studies we've done, the universe is flat... and therefor infinite... 5% * infinity is what? Infinity. So perhaps star formation will be less dense going forward, but I believe back when it was a lot more active, the universe was probably a lot less hospitable to those of us that don't find gamma ray bursts good for our health.
We now know that the universe is flat with only a 0.5% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe.
Source: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html
The night sky on Earth (assuming it survives) will change dramatically as our Milky Way galaxy merges with its neighbors and distant galaxies recede beyond view.
The quickening expansion will eventually pull galaxies apart faster than light, causing them to drop out of view. This process eliminates reference points for measuring expansion and dilutes the distinctive products of the big bang to nothingness. In short, it erases all the signs that a big bang ever occurred.
To our distant descendants, the universe will look like a small puddle of stars in an endless, changeless void.
I think this is pretty neat. I hope we as a race can soon learn more about why and how to effectively communicate/teach that to simple white collar desk workers like myself.
This proves nothing about the long term generation of all stars everywhere though - this is a trend describing the stars in our universe, so it's an observation based on the restricted population of those stars within 13.75 billion light years of us in observed spacetime.
I'm kind of curious what's outside that box. Let's fund that starship. Maybe my great grandkids will find out.
The universe seems to be about 2/3 through it's star forming period. So assuming the universe has been around for about 14 billion years, there is still some 7 billion years or so of star formation left. Can anyone of you get your arms around even 1 billion years of time? Hell, the human race even if it is extremely lucky will probably only last another few thousand years. That is a mere drop in the bucket of the universe's age. So, what the hell's the point of this post?
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor.
Without any new stars, how are the "name a star" businesses going to survive?
http://www.starregistry.com/
http://www.nameastar.net
http://www.starnamer.net
The next thing you know, they'll be suing each other for unique naming rights of every star
After the big bang there was a lot of dust/particles, rather than clumps. What do you think stars are made of, and the plants (acreation disk)? After billions of years of acreation, the only way now to produce mass that can aggregate into a star is for a star to supernova... which woudl barely generate enough free particle to acreate back into a star...
Surprised it hasn't been more prominently mentioned...
Ahem!
One of the many benefits of a liberal education is the ability to use a variety of complex epithets. "Teabaggers" is merely a superfluous, inutile crudity.
So is your mother.
we know stars will be burning for the next 10 to 100 trilllion years (10^13 to 10^14 years, not the UK trillion),
of course most stars have already formed from the initial surplus of the big bang and the short lived first stars which were hundreds of times as massive as our sun. we're now in the age of long lived stars and less births. the good spot for life, with heavier elements.
The Universe is expanding so matter gets rarified as it expands. If you can't collect enough mass to create a star then stars stop forming. I'd be curious if Brown dwarfs have increased in numbers since they require less mass. It does set a limit for the age of the Universe. My guess is the last of the stars grow cold 20 to 30 billion years from now. In 10 billion the numbers will drop radically and in around 30 billion the last stars should fade. It doesn't mean the end just that stars will cease to be a feature of the Universe. It'll probably be tens of billion of years after that that the Universe starts to grow cold. Eventually nuclear half life fades and no sources of heat will remain. It's insanely far off but there does seem to be a limit to the Universe as we see it now. Even if black holes and pulsars keep going for a 100 billion years there will still be a time when the energy runs out or at least it becomes so spread out as to be meaningless.
because I hate the Motion Picture Industry.
Stars stopped being made 6,000 yrs ago when God finished His creation. www.truthsjourney.com has some info.
We need to stop taxing the Star Creators.
Isn't this a sort of a non-result? There is only so much stuff in the universe to make stars from. Since it is used up by existing stars it is obvious that until they blow up new ones won't form?
Once we start building small black holes stars won't matter. You can get 100 times as much energy (hawking Radiation) out of a micro-black hole for the same amount of matter consumed as from complete fusion of hydrogen into iron. That hawking radiation can be collected and used to make new matter of any type that might be wanted - you can even recycle iron into hydrogen.
This will allow life to survive for many trillions of years even as the universe gradually goes dark.
Just need to build a monster converging gamma-ray laser black-hole maker and start spitting out those micro-black holes.
It is sad though to think of all that will be lost - eg all this effort to preserve tigers or whales is ultimately pointless.
"Put three grains of sand in a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars" - Sir James Jeans
This site gives a good introduction to our place in space http://www.jeffstanger.net/Astronomy/introtoastro.htm
There's plenty of stuff left to make stars out of.
Go look at M81/M82. Both very active galaxies. Because they've passed very close to each other.
Go look at the LMC and SMC in the southern hemisphere. They're being ripped apart and are causing a lot of new star formation right now. It will get more widespread as we merge.
The paper is a load of bollocks.
Our galaxy has had coalescence events 9-10billion years ago. That was a peak. We'll see another huge one in 5 billion years when we merge and become part of the Andromeda galaxy.
Because we've never been wrong about other scientific things we've "proven." Seriously, does anyone believe that we, from our limited perspective on the entire universe, would be able to "really" state this as fact? This is a joke.
...has made them sterile...
.. God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
--Genesis 2:2