This is how long we have before the universe disappears completely - and it's terrifying

It’s a terrifying thought, but experts think they have been able to do the maths to figure out when the universe will disappear completely.

The universe is thought to have originated from the Big Bang, approximately 13.787 billion years ago, and it has been evolving and growing ever since.

Albert Einstein theorised that black holes can only grow, while Stephen Hawking posed that they can decay, and these two opposing views got experts thinking about how long it will be before the universe itself completely disappears.

According to an article in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the answer in years is the number one with 78 zeros after it.

Yes – 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years.

The figure was derived by a black hole expert, a quantum physicist and a mathematician from Radboud University, Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Heino Falcke, Michael Wondrak and Walter van Suijlekom sided with Hawking’s view that black holes can decay.

They were able to show the process by which this happens – known as Hawking radiation – as well as prove that the process applies to any large object with a gravitational field.

Hawking radiation occurs when a pair of virtual particles appears near a black hole, but one escapes while the other falls into the black hole. It is the escaping particle that carries away some of the black hole’s mass, which effectively “evaporates” it.

They found that the evaporation time depended on the density of an object, and gave their calculation of how long (in years) it might take for the Moon and a human to evaporate in this way, one with 90 zeros.

“By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation,” van Suijlekom said.

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