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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: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:00AM
Shouldn't today's produced energy be zero? I thought the only time energy might have been produced might have been with the big bang?
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(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:25PM
Matter is converted to energy all the time.
(Score: 1) by q.kontinuum on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:44PM
E=mc^2, not E ~ mc^2. Which means matter is not just somehow equivalent to energy, but actually is energy, and vice versa. This goes so far that a mechanic wrist-watch, after it's wound up (and therefore, as a system, contains more energy) gains m=e/(c^2) mass. There is no gain of energy by converting mass to energy, this is just a conversion of one form of energy to another form of energy.
What I don't know/understand at all is how this works on quantum level (Quantum fluctuation [wikipedia.org])
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:51PM
In General Relativity, energy is only conserved locally; the energy of the universe as a whole can indeed change.
(Score: 1) by q.kontinuum on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:26PM
The article states "additional energy is constantly being generated by stars as they fuse elements like hydrogen and helium together" (I just checked it). This is simply wrong, and a bit disappointing really, since the aspect of energy-conservation of the 1st law of thermodynamics [wikipedia.org] is base-knowledge, iirc taught in 7th or 8th grade at school and therefore should be considered general knowledge.
Normally I wouldn't bitch on about it, but this seems to be an obvious flaw in the original article on livescience.com [livescience.com], and was copied unquestioned to several "news"-sites. I understand that livescience is not for scientists but for the interested laymen, but phrasing it "energy is constantly released by" instead of "additional energy is constantly being generated by" would not make the article any harder to understand and would embed the understanding that fusion releases energy, and doesn't generate it. It's articles like this that make people believe in perpetuum mobiles etc., since they read on a "science"-site that energy is produced.
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(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:01PM
Btw:Was the rating system changed? Since today I see my comments rated +1 instead of +2, although neither my karma nor my settings changed. For older comments I see default +1 plus karma modifier +1, for new posts I don't see any information how the rating is assembled.
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