Terrifying ‘death date' of the universe moves much CLOSER as scientists reveal exactly when all the stars will go out
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.
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This is an artistic impression of a neutron star "evaporating" slowly through Hawking-like radiation – and they mean very slowly
Credit: Daniëlle Futselaar/artsource.nl
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The universe is brimming with galaxies packed with stars – but one day, they'll all go out
Credit: NASA
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.
Read more on space
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
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.
Most read in Science
"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.
Terrifying Nasa simulation lets you 'plunge' into black hole to 'point of no return' that would rip your body apart
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."
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Scientists were able to calculate how long it would take a white dwarf to decay
Credit: Getty
HAWKING RADIATION
Hawking radiation is named after famed English theoretical physicist and Cambridge professor Stephen Hawking.
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
"One of the consequences of this so-called Hawking radiation is that a black hole very slowly decays into particles and radiation.
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Cambridge scientist Stephen Hawking famously suggested that radiation could escape from a black hole
Credit: Getty
What is a black hole? The key facts
Here's what you need to know...
A black hole is a region of space where absolutely nothing can escape
That's because they have extremely strong gravitational effects, which means once something goes into a black hole, it can't come back out
They get their name because even light can't escape once it's been sucked in – which is why a black hole is dark
What is an event horizon?
The point at which you can no longer escape from a black hole's gravitational pull is called the event horizon
The event horizon varies between different black holes, depending on their mass and size
What is a singularity?
The gravitational singularity is the very centre of a black hole
It's a one-dimensional point that contains an incredibly large mass in an infinitely small space
At the singularity, space-time curves infinitely, and the gravitational pull is infinitely strong
Conventional laws of physics stop applying at this point
How are black holes created?
Most black holes are made when a supergiant star dies
This happens when stars run out of fuel – like hydrogen – to burn, causing the star to collapse
When this happens, gravity pulls the center of the star inwards quickly and collapses into a tiny ball
Part of the star collapses inward thanks to gravity, and the rest of the star explodes outwards
The remaining central ball is extremely dense, and if it's especially dense, you get a black hole
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This image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope shows a black hole at the centre of galaxy M87
Credit: Getty
"This contradicts
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 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.
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