Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes evaporate through a process related to the event horizon that gives rise to Hawking radiation. A team of Dutch physicists claims that similar evaporation also applies to objects that have no event horizon. If they are right, then the universe will die of boredom in an unimaginably long time.
Evaporation of objects by radiation. Credit: Wondrak et al. (2023), Physical Review Letters.
For all we know, this universe is expanding and will probably continue to expand… all the time. It looks like in the unimaginably distant future, he’ll end up the exact opposite of how he started. A very gradual and extremely boring fade to nothingness. According to Stephen Hawking, black holes, including the largest ones, gradually evaporate over such a long period of time that it almost merges with our eternity.
Here’s Falcke. Credit: NWO / Wikimedia Commons.
Hawking once used an ingenious combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity to describe the fate of pairs of virtual particles in the vicinity of a black hole. It follows that when such pairs of particles are created and then destroyed near the horizon of black holes, it sometimes happens that one particle of the pair falls beyond the event horizon, while the other escapes away, in the form of Hawking radiation, carrying a tiny amount of energy.
Logo. Credit: Radboud University.
Michael Wondrak of the Netherlands’ Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and his colleagues have thoroughly investigated this Hawking process. They mainly focused on whether the mentioned event horizon is really necessary for this. Their analyzes included procedures from physics, astronomy and mathematics. Finally, it turned out that similar radiation can also occur very far from the event horizon.
As reported by Walter Van Suijlekom from the team of authors of the study they recently published Physical Review Lettersit turns out that far from the event horizon of a black hole, radiation can arise in connection with the curvature of space-time and the tidal forces created by the gravitational field.
According to Van Suijlekom, until now it was believed that this type of radiation only occurs near the event horizon. Their research suggests that an event horizon is not necessary.
The third of the authors, Heino Falcke, adds that Hawking-like radiation apparently also works for material objects in space, which nevertheless do not have an event horizon, such as the remains of dead stars. From this it can be concluded that after an unimaginably long time, not only black holes will evaporate, but literally everything will evaporate. Eventually, there will be nothing left in the universe.
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2023-06-11 17:34:15
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