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The Sun

Terrifying ‘death date' of the universe moves much CLOSER as scientists reveal exactly when all the stars will go out

Sean Keach, Head of Technology and Science Published: Invalid Date, 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. 5 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 black holes 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. 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." 5 HAWKING RADIATION Hawking radiation is named after famed English theoretical physicist and Cambridge professor Stephen Hawking. In the 1970s, Hawking suggested that radiation could escape from a black hole. "At the edge of a black hole, two temporary particles can form, and before they merge, one particle is sucked into the black hole 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. 5 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 5 "This contradicts Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, 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 the Moon 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.