The Universe is disintegrating much faster than previously thought. This is evidenced by the calculations of three Dutch scientists. According to their data, the last stellar remnants will take “only” 10⁷⁸ years to disappear. This is much shorter than the previously estimated 101100 years.
In 1974, physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that due to quantum effects near the event horizon, black holes could emit elementary particles. One consequence of this process is that they evaporate very slowly.
In 2023, a team of researchers from Radboud University published a paper in which they showed that not only black holes, but also other objects with a gravitational field, such as neutron stars, can vaporize in a process similar to Hawking radiation. The calculations also showed that the vaporization time of an object depended only on its density.
Since that publication, the researchers have received many questions from inside and outside the scientific community about how long the process will take and have answered them in a new paper.
To the researchers’ surprise, neutron stars and stellar black holes decay in the same amount of time: 1067 years. This was unexpected given that black holes have a stronger gravitational field, which presumably should make them evaporate faster. The contradiction is explained by the fact that black holes absorb some of their own radiation, which inhibits the process.
Scientists have also calculated how long it would take for the Moon and the human body to vaporize when exposed to Hawking-like radiation. That’s 1,090 years. Of course, in reality, there are many other processes that will lead to their much faster disappearance.
Therefore, the researchers chose a different number, 10⁷⁸ years, as the “end of the Universe”. This is the time it takes for white dwarfs, the longest-lived celestial bodies, to disintegrate. Previous studies, which did not take this effect into account, put the lifetime of white dwarfs at 101100 years.
Thus the final end of the Universe is coming much sooner than expected. But, fortunately, we are still talking about unimaginably huge periods of time, from our point of view.
According to Phys.org
