Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated How Much Time the Universe Has Left

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

Despite its spectacular birth, the universe will mostly likely eventually fade into nothingness with very little drama.
Black holes, as far as we know, will evaporate through Hawking radiation, with one of two identical, quantum-entangled particles floating into space and the other staying behind.
Other objects will evaporate in a process similar to Hawking radiation, with the densest disappearing the fastest.

While the universe might have started with a bang, it probably won’t go out with one. But however it comes about, that end might be much sooner than we thought.

If you ask astrophysicist Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom, they’ll tell you that those last days will not erupt into a cataclysmic explosion worthy of sci-fi special effects. Instead, the last remaining vestiges of all matter will just evaporate into particles floating in the void. In 2023, the trio theorized that it was possible for other objects besides black holes to slowly evaporate away via Hawking radiation, which aroused curiosity as to how soon it could possibly happen. Now, there is a hypothetical answer.

But don’t start doomsday prepping yet—Earth still has about 5 billion years left until it gets devoured by the Sun. So, according to the team, if our species manages to propagate beyond the Solar System and colonize some distant moon or planet, there are still another ~10⁷⁸ years left for the universe. That’s 1 with 78 zeroes after it. Even Twinkies won’t last that long.

It might seem unfathomable, but that mind-boggling max age for the universe is far lower than the previously predicted 10¹¹⁰⁰ years (which is 1 with 1100 zeroes). While this prior hypothesis did include the time it would take for black holes to evaporate, it did not factor in the evaporation of other objects.

“Using gravitational curvature radiation, we find that also neutron stars and white dwarfs decay in a finite time in the presence of gravitational pair production,” the researchers said in a study recently published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

When a pair of particles forms right on the lip of a black hole’s gaping maw, one can be pulled in past the inescapable event horizon, while the other escapes into nearby space. Because those particles are supposedly quantum-entangled, that rogue particle could be carrying information about the insides of a black hole (until the Hawking Information Paradox kicks in, of course). This called Hawking radiation. It has long been thought that only black holes emitted Hawking radiation, but in their new study, these researchers posit that a similar phenomenon could affect other ultradense objects without event horizons, such as white dwarf stars (star corpses left when the gases of a red giant dissipate) and neutron stars.

Everything with mass has gravity that warps spacetime. The more dense an object, the greater the warp, but less massive objects still have some effect on the space-time continuum. Objects with strong gravitational fields evaporate faster—white dwarves, supermassive black holes, and dark matter supercluster haloes are expected to hold out for 10⁷⁸ years, while neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes should hang around for about 10⁶⁷ years. Anything with a gravitational field is prone to evaporating. (This includes humans, and could put a glitch in our quest for immortality. It should take 10⁹⁰ years for our bodies to vanish.)

Even though the intense gravitational fields of black holes should cause them to evaporate faster, they put off total annihilation as long as possible because, unlike white dwarves or neutron stars, they have no surface and tend to reabsorb some escaped particles.

“In the absence of an event horizon, there is pair production outside the object which leads to particles hitting the surface and also pair production inside the object,” the researchers said. “We assume those particles to be absorbed by the object and to increase and redistribute internal energy. Both components will lead to a surface emission, which is absent in black holes.”

So, in enough years to cover 78 zeroes, all that will be left of black holes—and everything else in the universe—are particles and radiation. You (assuming immortality) and whatever you bought in bulk for doomsday will also evaporate. no matter when it comes, there really is no escape from the end.

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