So what else is new? Science has known since the late 1990s that the universe is accelerating outward. That means it will continue to dissipate on into the future through a number of well defined epochs. A large international collaboration called the Galaxy and Mass Assembly Project (GAMA) has been surveying deep regions of the universe to find out how the energy output of galaxies has changed.
They found that a large sampling are emitting about half the energy they did two billion years ago. This is because rates of star birth are steadily declining. This is part of a slow decline in our current epoch, known as the Stellar Epoch, the epoch of stars. As one astronomer put it, the universe has settled down on the couch, while getting lazier and older. The timeline of this epoch, however, is many trillions of years into the future.
