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from the it's-the-end-of-the-world-and-we-know-it dept.
The most comprehensive assessment of the energy output in the nearby universe reveals that today's produced energy is only about half of what it was 2 billion years ago. A team of international scientists used several of the world's most powerful telescopes to study the energy of the universe and concluded that the universe is slowly dying.
"We used as many space- and ground-based telescopes as we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200,000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible," Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) team leader Simon Driver, of the University of Western Australia, said in a statement. The astronomers created a video explaining the slow death of the universe to illustrate the discovery.
A chance to roll out your cosmology humor...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain_nifty on Wednesday August 12 2015, @06:27PM
Thought this was a known outcome, the heat death of the universe, laws of thermodynamics type stuff.
Good for them doing some scientific measurements, but this seems like it only confirms the known outcome, and maybe gives us a data point to know where we are on the curve.
(Score: 5, Funny) by ikanreed on Wednesday August 12 2015, @06:42PM
Observational verification of a theory?!?! WHAT KINDA SCIENCE IS THIS?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:34PM
The article doesn't seem to explain how they arrived at the conclusion.
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, they categorized galaxies they could see through a telescope by distance. So since the farther away they are the longer their light takes to get here, you're observing them J Random Long Unit of Time in the past, and apparently with math they can figure out how much energy they have from the spectra of the stars?
Considering how much of a sci fi nerd I am and that I had to stop and think about it for a minute, I think they really could have written the article a lot better.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 12 2015, @11:40PM
No, you're right. The article was very thin. I pitched it as a chance for fun geek humor.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @05:30PM
It's a new data point, but there's still insufficient data for a meaningful answer.