How can a universe built from stars, black holes, and dead stellar cores turn out to be less durable than physicists once believed? A new calculation from researchers at Radboud University argues that the far future may be governed by a broader form of Hawking-like evaporation than cosmologists had assumed. Their work suggests the cosmos does not have to wait for only black holes to disappear. White dwarfs and neutron stars, long treated as the stubborn leftovers of stellar evolution, may also slowly leak away through the same underlying quantum logic. That change collapses one estimate for the universe’s final era from an almost absurd 101100 years to about 1078 years, according to a study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
The key idea reaches back to Stephen Hawking’s 1975 proposal that black holes are not perfectly black. In quantum theory, particle pairs can briefly appear near an event horizon; one falls inward while the other escapes, carrying energy away. Over enough time, the black hole shrinks. The Dutch team extended that logic by arguing that an event horizon is not the only stage where this separation can happen. In their treatment, spacetime curvature itself can do the job, allowing dense objects without horizons to radiate and ultimately evaporate.
That is the conceptual jolt. It means the universe’s end state is no longer just a story about black holes outliving everything else. The calculations indicate that evaporation time depends mainly on density, not simply on how overpowering an object’s gravity appears from the outside. One of the strangest results is that neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes come out with roughly the same lifetime, about 1067 years. The reason, as co-author Michael Wondrak explained, is that black holes have no surface and can reabsorb part of their own emitted radiation, slowing the process. White dwarfs still endure longer, which is why they define the new upper bound of about 1078 years for the fading of familiar structure from the cosmos. Lead author Heino Falcke summarized the scale of the revision plainly: “So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time.”
The study also wandered into deliberately extreme examples. The Moon and a human body, if judged only by this mechanism, would take around 1090 years to evaporate. Those figures are not forecasts for real objects in any practical sense; countless other processes would erase them first. Their value is theoretical. They test whether the mathematics stays consistent when pushed far beyond the usual astrophysical cases.
That matters because cosmology is now crowded with competing ways for the universe to reach an ending. Some researchers are refining observations of how the universe expands, while others examine whether the vacuum itself could be metastable through Higgs-field physics and quantum decay. The Radboud result does not settle those deeper questions. It does something more specific: it changes the timetable for how long dense matter can remain in existence if Hawking-like radiation is a general feature of curved spacetime.
In that picture, the last chapter is not a sudden collapse or a dramatic flash. It is attrition. The universe runs down because even its toughest remnants are not permanent, and because the geometry of spacetime may quietly keep turning mass into an impossibly slow leak of particles until almost nothing structured remains.
