Rest assured that as everything seems to be falling apart on Earth, it also appears that the rest of the universe is on a downward trajectory, too.

In new research that gauged several vital signs of the cosmos, a team of 175 astronomers found that our universe is already well past its prime, creaking its way into a dismal future in which fewer and fewer stars will be born, until the process eventually stops entirely. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel — just the inevitable revenge of darkness.

“The universe will just get colder and deader from now on,” lamented Douglas Scott, a cosmologist at the University of British Columbia and a coauthor of the resulting yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, in a statement.

Scott and an army of astronomers analyzed a trove of optical data collected

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