Universe End Much Sooner? Radboud Team’s White Dwarf Model
Radboud University physicists calculated that white dwarfs could evaporate in roughly 10^78 years if a proposed form of particle production exists. The result is framed as the universe ending much sooner, but the effect is unconfirmed and the study does not date the universe's end.
A Radboud University team has calculated that white dwarfs could evaporate in roughly 10^78 years, a result some describe as the universe end much sooner than expected. The model does not give a date for the universe's end, and the effect it relies on is unconfirmed.
That figure is a 1 followed by 78 zeros. Heino Falcke, Michael Wondrak and Walter van Suijlekom report the calculations in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
What the team modeled
A white dwarf is the dense core left after a star stops fusing fuel. It keeps shining for a long time, cooling as it gives up stored heat. The researchers asked whether an isolated remnant could eventually lose the material that makes up the star itself.
Their idea is related to Hawking radiation, the prediction that black holes emit particles once quantum effects are included. The team asks whether the curvature of spacetime around an object could produce a similar effect even when the object has a surface.
A white dwarf offers a test on paper. It packs a great deal of matter into a small space without forming a black hole.
The work builds on the team's 2023 paper, which argued that spacetime curvature could drive particle production beyond the usual black hole setting. In the follow-up, the authors calculate the effect for a spherical, nonrotating object with uniform density.
What the result does not show
The calculation concerns what might happen after familiar sources of heat and light have faded. It does not establish when the universe ends.
Questions about how far the universe cools as it expands involve other physics, including how expansion changes the background radiation. Other processes could shape the universe's future on different timescales.
Background on Hawking radiation
In classical general relativity, a black hole's event horizon marks the boundary beyond which light cannot escape to distant observers. Stephen Hawking's calculation brought quantum fields into that curved spacetime. It predicted radiation that distant observers could detect in principle, with the outgoing energy coming at the expense of the black hole's mass.
For an isolated black hole, standard Hawking theory says a smaller mass means a higher temperature and a shorter lifetime. Stellar black holes would emit extremely weak radiation, which makes the effect hard to tell apart from other sources around them.
The Radboud team's estimate of roughly 10^78 years applies only if its proposed form of gravitational particle production occurs.
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