{"id":243474,"date":"2026-09-01T09:11:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T14:11:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/declining-star-formation-not-caused-by-simple-fuel-crisis-new-measurements-suggest"},"modified":"2026-09-01T09:11:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T14:11:36","slug":"declining-star-formation-not-caused-by-simple-fuel-crisis-new-measurements-suggest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/declining-star-formation-not-caused-by-simple-fuel-crisis-new-measurements-suggest","title":{"rendered":"Declining star formation not caused by simple \u2018fuel crisis,\u2019 new measurements suggest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/declining-star-formation-not-caused-by-simple-fuel-crisis-new-measurements-suggest.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The universe has been having fewer and fewer stellar \u201cbabies.\u201d Over the past 4.5 billion years, the rate of star birth has crashed to less than half of what it once was. But here\u2019s the twist: the most essential \u201cfuel\u201d for making stars has barely decreased.<\/p>\n<p>This finding comes from an international team led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. They used China\u2019s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) to make high-precision measurements of cosmic neutral atomic hydrogen over the past 4.5 billion years.<\/p>\n<p>The study reveals that while cosmic star formation has declined dramatically over this period, neutral atomic hydrogen (HI)\u2014a vital gas reservoir for galaxies\u2014has decreased only slightly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The universe has been having fewer and fewer stellar \u201cbabies.\u201d Over the past 4.5 billion years, the rate of star birth has crashed to less than half of what it once was. But here\u2019s the twist: the most essential \u201cfuel\u201d for making stars has barely decreased. This finding comes from an international team led by [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}