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stormwyrm [soylentnews.org] writes:

In 1974, Stephen Hawking, using arguments that combined the two pillars of modern physics, General Relativity and quantum field theory, showed that black holes should not be entirely black but would have to emit radiation [doi.org] that would eventually cause them to evaporate. In 2023 however, physicists Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Sujilekom, and Heino Falcke showed [aps.org] that Hawking radiation might not even require an event horizon: spacetime curvature alone is all that's required. They further refined their arguments in a follow-up paper [arxiv.org] that argues that even a neutron star might evaporate on the time scale similar to a stellar mass black hole (10⁶⁷ years), an object like our earth's moon 10⁹⁰ years, and interstellar gas clouds some 10¹⁴⁰ years. If this is correct, even single protons would be subject to this phenomenon, and they would also take something like 10⁶⁷ years to decay as well (this is a far longer timescale than proton decay predictions from Grand Unified Theories, which posit proton decay at about 10³⁴ to 10³⁶ years). Ethan Siegel has an article [bigthink.com] that explores this intriguing possibility:

It was long thought that black holes, once they formed, would be stable forever, but that story changed significantly with the work of Stephen Hawking in 1974. Black holes actually emit tiny amounts of radiation continuously, and on enormously long timescales of ~10^67 years or greater, they’ll eventually evaporate away entirely. In 2023, a provocative paper suggested that this radiation isn’t limited to black holes, implying that everything eventually decays away.

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