A cosmic expiry date has just been rewritten, bringing the universe’s finale closer, though it remains staggeringly distant. A team from Radboud University in Nijmegen calculated that, through Hawking-like radiation, even the toughest celestial bodies will vanish by around 10^78 years, far sooner than the 10^1100 years suggested by earlier models.
Black hole specialist Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom revisited their 2023 breakthrough showing that neutron stars can “evaporate” just like black holes. Prompted by waves of questions about the timeline, they dove back into the math and emerged with a single, surprising figure: white dwarf stars, the universe’s last shining survivors, will fade away in roughly 10^78 years.
The key lies in density. While black holes boast crushing gravity, their lack of a solid surface means some of their own radiation gets reabsorbed – a quirk that slows their disappearance to match neutron stars at about 10^67 years. That equalizing effect left researchers raising eyebrows, since stronger gravity was expected to speed up evaporation rather than level it off.
Curiosity didn’t stop there. A human body, reduced to fundamental particles, and even the Moon itself would succumb to Hawking-like decay in about 10^90 years, according to the calculations—though myriad other cosmic processes would undoubtedly intervene long before that ever mattered.
Behind these staggering numbers is a blend of old and new: Hawking’s 1975 insight that particle–antiparticle pairs at a black hole’s edge can liberate one particle as radiation, married to modern computational tools. Advanced simulations tracked how density controls evaporation rates across vastly different scales—from stellar remnants down to rocky satellites.
“It’s a rare chance to see where gravitational extremes meet quantum quirks,” van Suijlekom reflects, pointing out that melding astrophysics, quantum physics and cutting-edge mathematical techniques can sharpen the picture of Hawking radiation itself. With every recalculation, the universe’s ticking clock gains precision, even if its final tick remains eons beyond imagination.
The study has been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Source: EurekAlert
