A telescope tasked with making the largest-ever map of the universe has confirmed a harsh, if unsurprising, truth: Nothing lasts forever — not cold November rain, or even the cosmos itself.
Using a vast catalog of observations from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid and Herschel space telescopes, a team of 175 researchers has taken the most comprehensive reading of the universe's temperature ever recorded. By studying the heat emitted by stardust in more than 2 million galaxies, the team found that galaxies have grown slightly cooler and seen star formation rates slow down over the past 10 billion years of cosmic history.
