OUR universe is set to end far sooner than we thought – so if you planned on living forever, there’s bad news.
Scientists have calculated a possible “death date”;; for our universe, revealing how long it will take for all stars to decay.
Thankfully this terrifying dead universe is so far in the future that you won’t have to cancel any plans.
The prediction is 10 to the power of 78 years away – or a one followed by 78 zeroes.
Written out, that looks like: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
That’s a lot of candles for the universe’s final birthday cake.
This “end”;; is due to take place through an “evaporation”;;-like process where objects in the universe ultimately decay.
This is through a process similar to something called Hawking radiation, which is where decay over time.
And through a series of calculations, scientists were able to show how long it might take for other objects to decay too.
“The researchers calculated that the end of the universe is about 10^78 years away (a 1 with 78 zeros), if only Hawking-like radiation is taken into account,”;; Radboud University Nijmegen noted.
“This is the time it takes for white dwarf stars, the most persistent celestial bodies, to decay via Hawking-like radiation.”;;
Previous studies that have examined the end of the universe didn’t take this effect into account.
So the earlier estimation showed the lifetime of white dwarfs as 10 to the power of 1,100 years – or a one followed by 1,100 zeroes.
That’s far longer than the latest estimate, although both numbers are incomprehensibly large that it’s unlikely to affect humans.
“So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected,”;; said study lead author Heino Falcke.
“But fortunately it still takes a very long time.”;;
HAWKING RADIATION
Hawking radiation is named after famed English theoretical physicist and professor .
In the 1970s, Hawking suggested that .
“At the edge of a black hole, two temporary particles can form, and before they merge, one particle is sucked into the and the other particle escapes,”;; the Radboud University Nijmegen explained.
“One of the consequences of this so-called Hawking radiation is that a black hole very slowly decays into particles and radiation.
“This contradicts , which says that black holes can only grow.”;;
Scientists working on this new study calculated that this “evaporation”;; process can also apply to other objects with a gravitational field – not just black holes.
They also checked to see how long it would take and a human to decay in this way.
And it turns out that it would take us 10 to the power of 90 years (or one with 90 zeroes) to disappear.
But there are lots of other reasons why the Moon and humans won’t make it anywhere close to that distant time.
