Amid Cosmic Fatigue, Scarcely a Star Is Born
It’s evening in the universe.
The stars we have are dying, and we’re not making new ones the way we used to. A group of British and American astronomers recently reported that the birthrate of stars in the universe has declined precipitously and continuously over the last 11 billion years.
The universe today is only producing stars one-thirtieth as fast as it was at its peak in the lusty primordial days when protogalaxies, all gas and spume, were bouncing around like pups in a closet, colliding and merging, popping with blazing bright new stars.
In a news release issued by the Royal Astronomical Society, the astronomer David Sobral of Leiden University in the Netherlands said, “You might say that the universe has been suffering from a long, serious crisis: cosmic G.D.P. output is now only 3 percent of what it used to be at the peak in star production.” Dr. Sobral and his colleagues published their paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/science/space/births-of-stars-declining-sharply-astronomers-say.html?ref=science
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