Stephen Hawking's most famous prediction could mean that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate, new study says

 A new theory has radically revised Stephen Hawking's 1974 theory of black holes to predict that all objects with mass may eventually disappear.

An artist illustration of three balck holes merging.

Stephen Hawking's most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate.

In 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes eventually evaporate by losing what's now known as Hawking radiation — a gradual draining of energy in the form of light particles that spring up around black holes' immensely powerful gravitational fields. Now, a new update to the theory has suggested that Hawking radiation isn't just created by stealing energy from black holes, but from all objects with enough mass.

If the theory is true, it means that everything in the universe will eventually disappear, its energy slowly bled from it in the form of light. 

That means that objects without an event horizon [the gravitational point of no return beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole], such as the remnants of dead stars and other large objects in the universe, also have this sort of radiation," lead author Heino Falcke, a professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "And, after a very long period, that would lead to everything in the universe eventually evaporating, just like black holes. This changes not only our understanding of Hawking radiation but also our view of the universe and its future."

Space-time monsters

According to quantum field theory, there is no such thing as an empty vacuum. Space is instead teeming with tiny vibrations that, if imbued with enough energy, randomly burst into virtual particles, producing very-low-energy packets of light, or photons.

In a landmark paper published in 1974, Hawking famously predicted that the extreme gravitational force felt at the mouths of black holes — their event horizons — would summon photons into existence in this way. Gravity, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, distorts space-time, so that quantum fields get more warped the closer they get to the immense gravitational tug of a black hole's singularity.

Because of the uncertainty and weirdness of quantum mechanics, Hawking said this warping creates uneven pockets of differently moving time and subsequent spikes of energy across the field. These energy mismatches make photons appear in the contorted space around black holes, siphoning energy from the black hole's field so they can burst into existence. If the particles then escape the black hole, this energy theft led Hawking to conclude that — over a vast timescale much longer than the current age of the universe — black holes would eventually lose all of their energy and disappear completely.

But if a gravitational field is all that's needed to produce quantum fluctuations and photons, what's stopping any object with a space-time warping mass from creating Hawking radiation? Does Hawking radiation need the special condition of a black hole's event horizon, or can it be produced anywhere in space? To probe these questions, the authors of the new study analyzed Hawking radiation through the lens of a long-predicted process called the Schwinger effect, in which matter can theoretically be generated from the powerful distortions caused by an electromagnetic field.