We now understand the Universe’s doom better than ever

In a massive study, a team of researchers from around the world has found a depressing, but unsurprising, result: the Universe is dying. Pretty quickly, too. This isn’t really an unexpected finding, but it’s the most detailed examination of its eventual death yet.

The study was part of the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) Project, the largest multi-wavelength survey ever put together. The team, which was composed of researchers from across the globe, made use of some of the most powerful telescopes on the planet, including ESO’s VISTA and VST telescopes (both part of the Paranal University in Chile), as well as data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and NASA’s space telescopes, WISE and GALEX, and one from the European Space Agency, Herschel.

“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,” said Simon Driver (ICRAR, The University of Western Australia), who leads the large GAMA team.