London: Picture this. There will be no lights in the Universe in 10 billion years.

"The Universe is getting dimmer and dimmer. Within five or 10 billion years, the Universe will be a pretty dark place. But you probably won't start to notice the difference for a billion years," the journal 'Nature' quoted Alan Heavens of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, as saying.

According to Heavens and his team, star formation is now around 30 times slower than around six billion years ago, when the Sun came into existence.

It is so slow that more stars are fizzling out than are being born.

The finding doesn't surprise professional astronomers because physics predicts such a slowdown.

As star researcher Martin Barstow, of the University of Leicester in England, puts it, "Every time you make a star, you deplete the material left behind to form more."

He, however, does say that the new work is the best measure of the star slump so far because it includes dim galaxies.

After approximating the total production of stars throughout the Universe's history using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a co-ordinated astronomical scan of the night sky, Heavens' group compared wavelengths of light – which hints at the age of a star – with the numbers of stars of different ages from each of 40,000 nearby galaxies.

ANI