Physicists long believed the universe would slowly fade into darkness after about 10¹¹⁰⁰ years. Now, a team from Radboud University in the Netherlands says this end will come much sooner — after roughly 10⁷⁸ years. This number is a 1 followed by 78 zeros. The change comes from new research on Hawking radiation. In 1975, Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes lose mass slowly as particles form near their edges. One particle falls into the black hole while the other escapes, causing the black hole to evaporate over time. Earlier predictions said only black holes evaporate this way. But the Radboud team, including Heino Falcke, Michael Wondrak, and Walter van Suijlekom, shows that white dwarfs and neutron stars also evaporate through a similar process. White dwarfs are what remain when stars like our Sun run out of fuel and collapse into dense, Earth-sized cores. Neutron stars form when massive stars explode, compressing matter so tightly that protons and electrons merge into neutrons. These compact objects last trillions of years. The new study argues they too radiate away mass very slowly. The key is density — everything with strong gravity curves spacetime enough to cause evaporation. "All objects with a gravitational field should be able to evaporate," the researchers said. This means the universe’s last stars won’t last forever. Calculations reveal the final evaporation of these stellar remnants happens around 10⁷⁸ years, much earlier than the previous guess of 10¹¹⁰⁰ years. Falcke said, "So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time." This new finding redefines Hawking’s idea by focusing on spacetime curvature around any massive object, not just event horizons of black holes. The evaporation speed depends mainly on how dense the object is. Walter van Suijlekom noted that this interdisciplinary work mixes astrophysics, math, and quantum physics. He said, "By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we will unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation." For humans, nothing changes now or in the near future — these timelines stretch far beyond any known time scale. The new study simply reshapes scientists’ view of the universe’s very long-term future, showing Hawking radiation's bigger role in its eventual fate. When these last neutron stars and white dwarfs finally evaporate, the universe will lose all luminous matter. That final moment arrives not after a mind-boggling 10¹¹⁰⁰ years but in about 10⁷⁸ years. Still a vast and nearly unimaginable span.