A cold, dark future awaits us as new stars stop being created

Nov 7, 2012 22:41 GMT  ·  By

The rate at which new stars are being produced is dropping. Every modern model of the universe predicts this, it's also common sense, there's only so much hydrogen in the universe, all the stars are using it up and it will eventually all be consumed by fusion.

With not enough hydrogen to go around, no new stars can be formed. A dark and cold fate awaits our Universe. But we've got a bit more to go before that.

A new study throws some hard numbers at these assumptions and says that most of the stars that will ever exist have already been created.

Put another way, the stars that exist now in the universe, more than we can actually see since they're so far away, are most of the stars that will ever exist.

But the drop in star creation is not new. In fact, half of the stars created so far were born in a two billion years span, between 11 billion and 9 billion years ago. The other half was created since then, it took nine more billion years to create the same number of stars as were created in two.

The rate has dropped so much that the stars we have today, again including the ones that have formed far away and their light hasn't reached us yet, are some 95 percent of all the stars ever.