The far future of the universe may be less remote than older calculations suggested. If Hawking-like radiation is not limited to black holes but also affects dense stellar remnants, then the longest-lived objects in the cosmos do not persist for 101100 years. Their lifetime drops to about 10^78 years, still beyond ordinary imagination but dramatically shorter on cosmic terms.
The idea begins with Stephen Hawking’s famous argument that black holes are not perfectly black. In the standard picture, quantum fluctuations near an event horizon allow one member of a particle pair to escape while the other falls inward, leaving the black hole to lose energy over immense spans of time. What recent work from Radboud University adds is a broader claim: an event horizon may not be the only setting where gravity can drive this kind of leakage. According to the researchers, the curvature of spacetime itself can help produce radiation around extremely compact objects.
That shift matters because the universe’s late eras are expected to be dominated not by shining stars, but by remnants. White dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes are the durable leftovers of stellar evolution, the objects that remain after fusion ends and galaxies go dark. If those remnants also radiate away, then the timetable for a “heat death” style cosmos changes. The new calculations identify white dwarfs as the slowest to disappear, making them the practical clock for the universe’s last chapter. One result stands out.
The team found that neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes decay over the same timescale, around 10^67 years. That appears counterintuitive at first glance because black holes represent the stronger gravitational extreme. Yet Michael Wondrak explained the catch in a statement: But black holes have no surface. They reabsorb some of their own radiation, which inhibits the process. In this framework, density becomes the decisive variable, not the simple presence of an event horizon.
The broader implication is less about apocalyptic drama than about theoretical housekeeping. Cosmology already contains multiple end-state scenarios, including eternal expansion and eventual contraction, and some newer models tied to dark energy have pointed to a much earlier large-scale collapse. But the Hawking-like evaporation work addresses a different question. It asks what happens if the universe keeps expanding and the last survivors are compact, cold objects. In that setting, the final erasure may come not from a sudden crunch, but from a fantastically slow quantum drain acting on matter once thought almost permanent.
The researchers even extended the exercise to ordinary objects, calculating 10^90 years for the Moon and a human under the same mechanism alone. Those numbers are mostly useful as scale markers. They show how radically weak the effect is outside the densest environments, while also underscoring the paper’s central message: permanence may be absent everywhere, not just at black holes. Heino Falcke summarized the result plainly: “So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time.”
