End of the Universe Coming Sooner Than Thought, Scientists Reveal

The end of everything is coming sooner than we thought—but don't worry, you've probably still got time to work through your bucket list.

This is the conclusion of researchers from Radboud University in the Netherlands, who calculated how long it would take for the last remnants of the stars to decay into oblivion.

The universe, they say, will go absolutely dark in 1078 years (that's a 1 with 78 zeros)—far sooner than the previous estimate of 101100 years (or 1 with 1100 zeros).

The process behind this disintegration is related to so-called Hawking radiation, the theoretical process by which black holes are thought capable of evaporating to nothing.

"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," said paper author and mathematics professor Walter van Suijlekom.

In 1975, the British theoretical physicist professor Stephen Hawking argued that—despite their reputation for being inescapable—it is possible for material to leave a black hole.

This process relies on a weird quantum phenomenon. Hawking proposed that pairs of subatomic particles and their antiparticle opposites are able to pop into existence as a result of fluctuations in the background "vacuum energy" of space.

In almost all situations, these particles would annihilate and there would be no lasting effect. However, Hawking argued, when such pairs appear on the event horizon of a black hole, it would be possible for one with negative energy to fall in and the other to get away.

To an observer, it would appear that the black hole was emitting radiation—and gradually losing mass and rotational energy in the process. Given this, black holes that aren't actively gobbling up material gradually shrink at a rate that is inversely proportional to its mass.

The new paper builds on a 2023 study in which van Suijlekom and his colleagues—physicists Heino Falcke and Michael Wondrak—showed that all objects with a gravitational field should also be able to evaporate via a process similar to Hawking radiation.

The team determined that the evaporation time of a given object is dependent only on its density—and were surprised to discover that the average neutron star and stellar black hole take about the same amount of time to decay: 1067 years.

This was a surprise; black holes have a far stronger gravitational field, and so were expected to evaporate faster.

However, Wondrak explains, "Black holes have no surface. They reabsorb some of their own radiation, which inhibits the process."

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References

Wondrak, M. F., van Suijlekom, W. D., & Falcke, H. (2023). Gravitational Pair Production and Black Hole Evaporation. Physical Review Letters, 130(22). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.221502

Falcke, H., Wondrak, M. F., & van Suijlekom, W. D. (2025). An upper limit to the lifetime of stellar remnants from gravitational pair production. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2025/05/023