This amused me as a closing paragraph given what the rest of the article noted. (The 95% figure.) If you had closed with a figure of six or seven percent, then I would have something to ponder.

Not an expert on such matters, but wouldn’t you suppose that the rate star formation might be a process that has peaks and troughs? When the stars that were made in the ‘flurry’ 9-11 billion years ago ‘die’ (assuming they haven’t all died already), won’t their debris & remnants form the dust clouds that give rise to the stars of the future?

The universe is not a perpetual motion machine.

As stars live they fuse their hydrogen into other elements. When they die some of them explode and eject their material into dust clouds that do give rise to stars in the future. However, 1) since they’ve already fused some of their hydrogen into heavier elements, the material to eject back into the universe to make new stars is not purely hydrogen, but also contains heavier elements that are useless for the purpose of making new stars, and 2) some of the substance that made up the old stars never gets ejected back into dust clouds, but instead forms inert dead stellar remnants, like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes, the means that with each generation of stars, the total amount of hydrogen available in the universe to make new stars goes down.

And once the universe runs out of accessible hydrogen in sufficient quantity and density for gravitational collapse to make new stars, star formation will stop.

QUOTE: “Every Galaxy will have New Stars for Trillions of Years! [November 7, 2012] ~ …Yes, it’s interesting that the star formation rate has declined, and it’s interesting that it’s declined at the rate we’ve observed. But it’s not going to drop to zero any time soon, and if you sum up the total number of stars in our Universe’s future, it’s actually far greater than the number of stars that have already existed up until this point in time, a far cry from the “only 5% more than we have now” figure you may have read.

Although we might be approaching the peak of star density within our galaxy, we can very strongly say that the vast majority of stars that will ever call our galaxy home haven’t been born yet. We won’t live long enough to see them, either, as many trillions of years into the future is far too ambitious to count on, even for those of you counting on the singularity. But based on the physics and astronomy we know, there will be new stars for ages and ages to come, outnumbering even the full complement of stars that have ever existed up until today.”

the researchers didn’t look for alpha particles. They used optical facilities to observe photons, H-alpha photons.

regards,

JM