In article ,
James Goetz writes:

Lord Kelvin's prediction of heat death indicates the eventual end
to star formation in the observable universe.

Have any astrophysicists made any predictions for the endurance of
star formation in the observable universe?

Or does anybody here want to take a crack at predicting it?

[[Mod. note --
1. This is really an astronomy question rather than a general physics
question, so I have set the Followup-To header to point to our
sister newsgroup sci.astro.research .
2. As to answering your question: Trying to understand/model the star
formation rate of the universe has been a major research area for
decades (e.g., try the search term "star formation history of the universe"
in google scholar or the ADS). But most of this focuses on the *past*
star formation rate. I'm sure there are studies trying to forecast
this into the future, but I don't have references handy.
-- jt]]

Star formation is heavily influenced by galaxy interactions. Thus, one
would at least need to run galaxy-evolution simulations into the future,
but no-one does this. One reason is that one can't check the
simulations by comparing to observations. The other is that with time
matter become more and more clumped, so more dynamic range is needed for
realistic simulations. (I had never seen this discussed in the
literature, but a few years ago I asked some of the main players in the
field why this is the case.)