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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."
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..."
Maybe we should just wait for another 9 to 11 billion years to see if they're right?
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 blame Universal cooling.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I for one welcome our new entropic overlords. No (stellar) news is good news, right?
I don't think you understand the word "since".
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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!
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
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.
Do you know how much those things *cost* to build new. Jeez.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I prefer to think of it as "gaining helium (and heavier things)," but I guess you're one of those "star is half empty" kind of people?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Astronomy is just lies from the Devil to fool us. And you fell for it...hook, line, and [jeremy irons]tzinker[/jeremy irons].
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The truly sad thing is the direction of the thrust of technology in our most...valuable? profitable?...companies: advertising. Google: worth billions! Realizes the searchable web so they can...spy on people to better push ads at them. Facebook: (was) worth billions! Connects people as never before...so they can better push ads at you. Not rocketships, not men on the men...our best and brightest are hard at work pushing ads for dick pills.
Then at least occasionally somebody DOES set their sights higher, and look at the comments on Slashdot: a bunch a cynical whiners casting insults at Elon Musk.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
It's not really cooling, it's just spreading the same amount of energy over an increasingly large area. The sum total is still the same.
There's a word for "spreading the same amount of energy over an increasingly large area": cooling. That's the normal way that cooling happens after all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You need to update your memes. The people lefties hate are called "Tea Partiers" now, not "neocons". Hasn't been "neocons" since 2010. Remember, it doens't matter what either group actually stood for, the point is to corrupt the language.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We're running out of stars.... Get 'em while they're hot!
“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.
This is a huge error in the Wired article "The telescopes searched for alpha particles emitted by Hydrogen atoms (commonly found in star formation, appearing as a bright red light)." An alpha particle is the nucleus of a Helium atom, so if hydrogen could emit that it would be an incredible feat! However, they really mean H-alpha line emission, a bright emission line that comes from the recombination of a proton and electron and it can be measured out to high redshifts.
They aren't observing fusion since that process takes place deep inside the stars.
Well, I still don't get this very well...
General Relativity doesn't conserve the total energy. The total energy of the photons of the Universe is reducing as the Universe expands, and the total of dark energy is increasing much faster, but we don't even know WTF that thing is, so this may not be usefull at all.
Rethinking email
What, like X-Factor you mean
No, he said a star making machine.
.... like Hollywood ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
Don't worry. Obama can fix it. Just hope it with all your heart and he will change it for you.
Mitt, is that you? :P
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Aliens use cheap noname chinese laptops?