An international team of astronomers says new data shows energy output measured across more than 200,000 galaxies is only about half as strong as it was two billion years ago. Scientists point to this latest study as further evidence that the universe is slowly dying.
The Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) project presented the data at an international astronomical gathering in Hawaii. The survey finds the universe’s fading is taking place “across all in wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the far infrared,” according to a press release.
“The Universe will decline from here on in, sliding gently into old age,” said Simon Driver a professor at The University of Western Australia who also leads the GAMA team. “The Universe has basically sat down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze,” Simon said in the statement.
[blockquote]”Once you’ve burned up all the fuel in the universe, essentially, that’s it,” says Joe Liske of the University of Hamburg, one of the members of the research team. “The stars die, like a fire dies, and then you have embers left over that then glow but eventually cool down. And the fire just goes out,”[/blockquote]
A strange assertion for those of us brought up on the conceptual truism of conservation of energy; that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely change its form, or so Einstein asserted. It is a philosophical or conceptual truism, not necessarily an evidential one, and must hold otherwise nothing makes sense.
It may be true that there is observable data that heat and light and their strength across the spectrum may diminish over time, it does not conceptually follow that energy has diminished or disappeared. It may merely have changed form into some latent shape elsewhere, ready indeed to start all over again, as happened ‘in the beginning.’
Until these scientists have poked their heads into a black hole or a parallel dimension universe, it may be a little early to close down the issue.
What does it all mean?
Aha! a topical article on this.