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 PiMuNu on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:04AM
Note that homegeneity and isotropy of the universe are treated by physicists as an axiom. Physicists *assume* there is nothing special about the local universe when doing cosmology. Fundamental stuff like conservation of momentum and conservation of angular momentum come from this axiom. It may be that this is not true on the large scale, but presumably the paper authors treat this as an axiom implicitly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:35AM
I see. So on very small and very large scales that humans cannot directly sense there is homogeneity, but at the intermediate level all we experience is heterogeneity. It also happens to simplify the math, just as humans would like because we evolved to be as lazy as possible. It sounds anthropocentric, like humans are building tools and designing experiments based on that simplifying assumption that may be incapable of detecting deviations. I'm not criticizing, but how could that possibility be ruled out?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @05:20PM
At the largest scales we can observe, the universe is very homogeneous. For example, the inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background are so small that it took a rather big effort to measure them.
Note that when considering cosmic scales, galaxies, and even galaxy clusters, are microscopically small.