Posted on 05/12/2025 11:28:34 AM PDT by Red Badger
Conceptual image depicting end of the universe by generative AI (© The 2R Artificiality - stock.adobe.com)
In a nutshell
* Scientists discovered that neutron stars and white dwarfs are slowly evaporating, shortening the universe’s expected lifespan from 10^1100 years to 10^78 years.
* All massive objects lose energy through a process similar to how black holes evaporate, with denser objects deteriorating faster. Despite this “earlier” end, the universe’s death is still inconceivably far in the future—neutron stars will last 10^68 years and white dwarfs about 10^78 years.
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NIJMEGEN, Netherlands — Scientists have just calculated that our universe will end much sooner than previously thought—although “soon” is still an almost inconceivable 10^78 years away (that’s a 1 followed by 78 zeros).
A research team from Radboud University in the Netherlands has discovered that even the most resilient cosmic objects—like neutron stars and white dwarfs—are actually evaporating through a previously overlooked process. This revelation dramatically shortens the universe’s estimated lifespan, though humans won’t be around to witness it.
“So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time,” says lead author Heino Falcke of Radboud University, in a statement.
The Universe Has an Expiration Date Previous studies had estimated white dwarfs—the most persistent stellar corpses—would last a mind-boggling 10^1100 years. The new calculations trim that to “just” 10^78 years when accounting for a process similar to how black holes evaporate.
The Dutch researchers found that all massive objects leak energy through a process called “gravitational pair production.” In this process, the warping of space and time around heavy objects causes virtual particles to become real particles that escape, taking energy with them.
For decades, scientists believed this kind of evaporation only happened to black holes, through a process called Hawking radiation named after physicist Stephen Hawking. But this new research reveals you don’t need a black hole’s boundary (event horizon) for this evaporation to occur—just extremely curved spacetime.
This study follows up on the team’s 2023 paper. After showing that neutron stars can “evaporate” like black holes, they received many questions about timing, which led to this new research.
Artistic impression of a neutron star that is “evaporating” slowly via Hawking-like radiation (Credit: Daniëlle Futselaar/artsource.nl)
Not All Dense Objects Are Created Equal
To the researchers’ surprise, neutron stars and stellar black holes take almost the same amount of time to decay: approximately 10^67-68 years.
“But black holes have no surface,” says co-author and postdoctoral researcher Michael Wondrak. “They reabsorb some of their own radiation which inhibits the process.”
The Moon and a human body would take roughly 10^90 years to evaporate through this process. The researchers note that “there are other processes that may cause humans and the Moon to disappear faster than calculated.”
Rewriting the Rules of Cosmic Aging
The research challenges our understanding of how the universe ages. In 1975, Hawking proposed that particles could escape from black holes when two temporary particles form near the edge—one gets sucked in, the other escapes. This contradicted Einstein’s theory that black holes can only grow.
Walter van Suijlekom, mathematics professor and co-author, sees value in this cross-disciplinary work: “By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation.”
One possibility raised in the paper involves “fossil neutron stars” from previous universes. Since these remnants would last 10^68 years, they could theoretically survive through multiple cosmic cycles—if universes recycle more frequently than once every 10^68 years.
The universe that started with a bang won’t end with one. Instead, over almost unimaginable timescales, even its most resilient objects will quietly fade away—dissolving into radiation through the effects of curved spacetime.
Paper Summary
Methodology
The researchers used covariant perturbation theory to calculate the creation of virtual pairs of massless scalar particles in spherically symmetric, asymptotically flat curved spacetimes. They investigated simplified optically thick, non-rotating spherically symmetric compact objects of constant density embedded in vacuum spacetime. The team calculated the probability that vacuum transitions to vacuum using the 1-loop effective action, which corresponds to a Feynman path integral over all closed paths of virtual field excitations. When this action has a positive imaginary part, it indicates that some virtual particle pairs escape re-annihilation and become real particles. The researchers applied this approach to neutron stars and white dwarfs, calculating their evaporation rates and estimating their lifetimes.
Results
The study found that all compact objects, including neutron stars and white dwarfs, will eventually evaporate through gravitational pair production. The evaporation timescale (τ) scales with the average mass density (ρ) as τ ∝ ρ^(-3/2). For neutron stars, this translates to a maximum lifetime of approximately 3.4 × 10^68 years, which is comparable to that of low-mass stellar black holes. White dwarfs would last much longer, about 3.3 × 10^78 years. The researchers also calculated a maximum stable density scale of ρmax ≈ 3 × 10^53 g/cm^3, above which objects would have already evaporated during the current age of the universe. Their calculations show that the emission from neutron stars would be slightly different from black holes, with both direct emission and surface emission components.
Limitations
The researchers acknowledged several limitations in their approach. First, they idealized neutron stars as optically thick objects with constant density, whereas real neutron stars have varying density profiles. Second, the calculations used an approximation that is second order in spacetime curvature and valid to arbitrary but finite order in proper time. The researchers note that there might be additional effects from re-summing infinitely many terms that are inaccessible with current methods. Finally, like Hawking radiation, this effect is not experimentally verified, and there is little hope it can be directly detected for macroscopic objects.
Funding and Disclosures
The work was supported by the ERC Synergy Grant “BlackHolistic,” the NWO Spinoza Prize, a grant from NWO NWA 6201348, and the Excellence Fellowship from Radboud University. The authors acknowledged discussions with Ethan Siegel about multiverses on Mastodon.
Publication Information
The paper titled “An upper limit to the lifetime of stellar remnants from gravitational pair production” was prepared for submission to JCAP (Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics). The authors are Heino Falcke, Michael F. Wondrak, and Walter D. van Suijlekom from the Department of Astrophysics/IMAPP and Department of Mathematics/IMAPP at Radboud University in the Netherlands. The paper was published on arXiv in February 2025.
And it’s Trumps fault.
This extremely long timespan assumes that the universe will continue to expand at a constant rate, eventually undergoing a “Heat Death” in which entropy will win over everything else. Something around 10^100 years for all matter in the universe to become radiation. But there is also a “Big Rip” theory that says the expansion rate will accelerate exponentially, shortening the universe’s lifespan to only around 20 billion more years. The end will also come very quickly. By the time galaxies start to be torn apart, a few years later the solar system, the Earth in a week, and in another hour atoms will fly apart due to cosmic expansion.
Oh no!….
Cool. I have the universe in my death pool.
There was no beginning, and there will be no end.
(IT’S SOONER THAN YOU THINK..)
And later than most realize.
For planet Earth 🌎🌍.
But there will still be the
coming 7 Years of ‘Peace and Security’
And then His 1,000 Years Reign
Shortly after that, Eternity
Maranatha!!
One of only two things will happen:
Expansion will continue until absolute zero becomes the temperature of the entire universe at which time everything falls apart. Entropy wins.
or
Expansion slows down and gravity takes hold and then everything starts to fall back down into the original gravity well and recreates the singularity at which time the Big Bang starts it all over again. Gravity wins.............
The Universe has an end
Its Creator, God, has His own timing
It’s sooner than they think
...And I saw a New Heaven and A New Earth............
make it dawn so we wont have to work thursday.
____________________________________________________
Let’s not, I’m sort of retired and have given up getting up at 5am every day.
TM
Once Judge Boasberg was informed of these latest developments, he issued his umpteenth Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on any ending of this, or any other universe.
You just described heat death vs. big crunch. Currently it appears that heat death will win, because observations since 1998 show that the universe’s expansion rate is accelerating, not slowing down. That was a total surprise in 1998, by the way—no one expected it. But the scenario I just talked about, big rip, occurs if the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating. That would mean dark energy in the universe is not constant but increasing as the universe expands, assuming it is a property of space itself.
So I am not the only one that thinks this headline is hilarious.
“...the universe’s expansion rate is accelerating, not slowing down. ...”
That makes total sense.
As the universe expands, the distance between masses increases, so therefore the effects of gravitational interactions between those masses becomes weaker and weaker on a logarithmic scale. So the expansion would accelerate as the force of gravity holding everything back gets less and less.
maybe FedEx will deliver our parcel by then?
That’s not entirely correct. The expansion rate would still continue to slow down regardless of how far apart objects in the universe became, since gravity doesn’t have a “cut-off point”. The acceleration being referred to is something other than the lack of gravity—it is a repulsive force caused by what they’ve termed “dark energy”. Nothing else can explain why the expansion rate seems to be accelerating.
The following major illicit drug producing and/or drug-transit countries were identified and notified to Congress by the President on September 14, 2014, consistent with section 706(1) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003 (Public Law 107-228):
Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.
In other words, all of South America, where most of the illegal aliens occupying the U.S. come from.
Boeing just announced they hope to have the new Air Force One done by then but can’t guarantee it.
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