Eventually All Stars and Planets Will Evaporate Via Hawking Radiation

by

Due to Hawking radiation, black holes will eventually evaporate, but the event horizon is not as crucial as had been believed. Gravity and the curvature of spacetime cause this radiation too. This means that all large objects in the universe, like the remnants of stars, will eventually evaporate.

Using a clever combination of quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking argued that the spontaneous creation and annihilation of pairs of particles must occur near the event horizon.

Researchers at Radboud University investigated whether or not the presence of an event horizon is indeed crucial. They combined techniques from physics, astronomy and mathematics to examine what happens if such pairs of particles are created in the surroundings of black holes. The study showed that new particles can also be created far beyond this horizon.

Physical Review Letters- Gravitational Pair Production and Black Hole Evaporation

They present a new avenue to black hole evaporation using a heat-kernel approach analogous as for the Schwinger effect. Applying this method to an uncharged massless scalar field in a Schwarzschild spacetime, they show that spacetime curvature takes a similar role as the electric field strength in the Schwinger effect. They interpret the results as local pair production in a gravitational field and derive a radial production profile. The resulting emission peaks near the unstable photon orbit. Comparing the particle number and energy flux to the Hawking case, they find both effects to be of similar order. However, the pair production mechanism itself does not explicitly make use of the presence of a black hole event horizon.

17 thoughts on “Eventually All Stars and Planets Will Evaporate Via Hawking Radiation”

  1. Has this “everything will evaporate into Hawking radiation” phenomenon been observed in nature or reproduced in a lab? If not, then it’s speculation. Until observed repeatedly, it’s just a hypothesis at best.

  2. Ok, so the universe evaporates in about 10^500 years and nothing is left. If nothing is left and there is no way of proving that the universe ever existed then I ask, Did the universe ever exist ?

    • one point of view
      IiUC, space (dimensions?) is there, if all matter within evaporated, but nothing within to measure time and if no other impulse from ‘outside’ the observable universe, it possibly would rest in a stateless endurance or for infinite time (hardly to accept or even imagine for our souls and ‘ego’ related consciousness)?

      “Speculatively, it is possible that the universe may enter a second inflationary epoch, or assuming that the current vacuum state is a false vacuum, the vacuum may decay into a lower-energy state.”

      10^10^120 (stacked exponents)
      10^(10*120)
      “The highest estimate for the time it takes for the universe to reach its final energy state.”

      “Did the universe ever exist ?” What matter should be transmitting information?

  5. At the moment we are only just beginning the journey of understanding,,, let’s reflect on the fact that we are at base 1 ie the universe came from the Big Bang ,,, and testing that theory,,, we have to start somewhere,,,, but things don’t add up ,,,, let’s not get ahead of our selfs about anything ,,,, chances are we are wrong in most things ,,,personally atoms come and go in space time and clump together this in time cause galaxies etc etc so the universe is infinite and never ending i don’t believe in the Big Bang nore do i believe that the universe is expanding as galaxies in local groups come together and what we see is confusing as its warped by space time and not taken in real time grouping but as a whole which doesn’t give a real picture of reality

  7. Or Not…

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07628

    Comment on “Gravitational Pair Production and Black Hole Evaporation”

    We show that some consequences based on the proposed imaginary part of the lowest order effective action are in sharp tension with exact results on pair creation in electrodynamics and cosmology. This casts serious doubt on their claims for particle production in a Schwarzschild spacetime.

  8. It may well be the case, but aren’t stars and planets being created all the time and if that’s the case there will always be stars and planets forever

  9. I’ve always been a multiverse kind of guy.
    Even with the near-heat death and exceptional expansion/degradation of our universe, this ‘localized’ end game is possibly part of the nucleation and development of new universe(s). Of course, we are separated from it (and others) by our current regimen Law of Physics and its particular causality (the lack of causality overflow from one to the other can be a definition of the boundary – which isn’t to say ‘information’ can’t be transferred).
    Anyway, much of this and the above has been hypothesized and papered about for decades.
    Recommended Reading: The Five Ages of the Universe (though it is over 20 years old).

    • Is there ‘information’ without matter (possible, imaginable?)?
      What about conservation of energy with matter annihilating (stored in expanded space?)?

  10. I’ve been told that given enough time (near infinite), even a massively expanded universe is not a barrier for mater to quantum tunnelling of matter into various black holes (or other large bodies). If that is so it would mean not just black holes and stars will evaporate but all mass. That would mean Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is back on the table even if proton decay is not ever observed.

  11. Well, that’s fine, but we’re talking about a time scale that’s cosmologically indistinguishable from forever.

Comments are closed.