The universe’s expiry date moved from 10¹¹⁰⁰ years to 10⁷⁸ — and the number is the least interesting part of the paper

A paper from Radboud University in the Netherlands, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and led by the astrophysicist Heino Falcke, revised the estimated lifetime of the universe from about 10¹¹⁰⁰ years down to roughly 10⁷⁸.

Headlines made this sound like bad news arriving early. Be clear about what actually changed, because the number matters least of all.

What the study did

The question was how long the universe's most durable objects last. White dwarfs — the dense remnants left when stars like the Sun exhaust their fuel — are the usual answer, and the old figure of 10¹¹⁰⁰ years came from asking how long they take to decay by conventional means.

The Radboud group asked a different question: do white dwarfs evaporate? They worked through the timescale on which Hawking-style radiation would carry them away, and got about 10⁷⁸ years.

That rests on an earlier result. A 2023 paper by Falcke with Michael Wondrak and Walter van Suijlekom argued that black holes are not the only objects that emit Hawking radiation — that sufficiently dense bodies could also evaporate gradually, with no event horizon involved.

The claim worth arguing about

This is the real content of the work, and almost no coverage led with it.

Hawking's original result ties evaporation to the event horizon of a black hole: pairs of virtual particles separate across the boundary, one escapes, and the black hole loses mass. The Radboud position is that the horizon is not the essential ingredient — that strong spacetime curvature alone is enough, so any sufficiently dense object leaks energy over long enough timescales.

If that is right, evaporation is not a peculiarity of black holes but a general property of matter in curved spacetime, and the lifetime of everything shortens. The revised date for the universe is a consequence of that claim, not the finding itself.

What has not been established

Three things, and they should sit next to the headline.

1. Hawking radiation has never been detected. Not from a black hole, not from anything. It is a well-motivated theoretical prediction that is far too faint to observe with any instrument that exists. The entire calculation rests on a phenomenon nobody has measured.
2. The extension beyond horizons is contested. That is normal for work at this frontier, and it is where the argument among physicists actually sits — not over the arithmetic.
3. Neither number means anything intuitively. 10⁷⁸ and 10¹¹⁰⁰ are both so far beyond the current age of the universe — about 10¹⁰ years — that calling one "sooner" is technically true and practically meaningless. The Sun will have been gone for 10⁶⁸ times longer than it has existed.

Why a result like this is still worth reporting

Not because the deadline moved. Because of how the question was approached: take a mechanism established in one extreme regime, ask whether the condition everyone assumed was necessary actually is, and follow the arithmetic. That the answer rewrites a number by a thousand orders of magnitude is a consequence of the universe being very old, not a measure of how dramatic the physics was.

And the honest framing of the result is conditional, which is how the researchers put it: if Hawking-like radiation works this way, then nothing is permanent, including the objects we currently treat as effectively eternal.

Sources: the paper in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics; Radboud University; Space.com; ScienceAlert; Sci.News; and Prothom Alo's original report.