Earlier this year, Euclid – the European telescope assigned to create the largest 3D map of the Universe – sent back troves of cosmic data from deep space. Astronomers have been hard at work picking up the stars, with one group coming to a surprising conclusion about the fate of the universe.
By studying both optical measurements and flare data from the Herschel Mission currently underway, a group of 175 stars created a very detailed heat map of the universe. The heat map strongly suggests that star formation in our universe has passed its peak and that galaxies have begun to cool. In short, our universe has “passed forward,” the researchers noted in a statement.
“The atmosphere is going to cool off and on from now on,” added Douglas Scott, study author and paleontologist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, in a statement. A paper describing the results has been submitted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics and is currently available as a preprint on arxiv.
As cosmic dust settles
For the analysis, the researchers studied the heat emission data from 2.6 million galaxies sent by Euclid. Specifically, they used a fitting method to track the intensity fluctuations and the corresponding temperature signatures of 10 billion light-years of the universe’s history. Then, they make the necessary adjustments to account for things like redshift, or shifts in the galaxy’s mass as it moves away from us.
The temperature of the dust has not changed much from 35 Kelvin, or -396 degrees Celsius), in the early days of the universe, according to the study. In ten billion years, the temperature of the dust fell by 10 kelvin, so about 1.8 degrees.
This is important because the temperature of galactic dust is closely linked to the rate of star formation, the researchers noted in the release. Simply put, hot galaxies form more stars, while dense galaxies form fewer stars. Small but clear trends in galactic dust concentrations and temperatures mean that our universe is slowly starting to fill with storage, which means “Scott explained.
The distant future
All that being said, if anything is to be felt on Earth as a result of this gradual cooling, it won’t happen for at least tens of billions of years. Nevertheless, the new findings are impressive because astronomers have provided a large dataset to draw understandable conclusions about galaxies, which are considered the building blocks of the cosmos.
“In the past, researchers would not have had a large enough sample or they would have missed hot or cold stars,” Ryyley Hill, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia who led the study, said in a statement. “Since Euclid is so full, you can really measure the dust temperatures in a way that you can’t argue with.”
If the universe really slows down the formation of stars, it opens up a whole new set of questions for researchers to explore. What does this mean about dark energy or dark matter? And since this is the first batch of euclid data, will subsequent cycles produce something completely different? Will current cosmological models continue to successfully defend their credibility?
None of these questions will be easy to answer. So it seems that, even if the star formation of the universe is advanced, human research has a long way to go.
