Black holes don't live forever, but they might live long enough to look like white holes

Black holes live forever, at least according to general relativity. Once material crosses a black hole's event horizon, it is trapped forever, until the last day of cosmic time. But we know that isn't true. The science-journalism coverage adds useful context, while the strongest evidential footing still comes from the underlying data, papers or institutional documentation.

That matters because astrophysics becomes persuasive only when an observed signal can be tied to a physically defensible explanation. Compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes are natural laboratories for extreme physics, but the distance and complexity of these systems make interpretation difficult without multi-wavelength coverage and careful modeling. A detection without a mechanism is only half a result. the other half comes from showing that the signal fits quantitatively inside a coherent physical picture rather than merely being consistent with a broad family of models. This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center Black holes live forever, at least according to general relativity.

It doesn't take into account the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of the quantum. In his original 1974 paper, Hawking calculated the lifetime of a black hole to be about 2 x 10 67 M 3 years, where the mass of the black hole is in solar masses.

Given that the age of the universe is only about 10 10 years old, your typical black hole is effectively immortal. Which brings us to a recent work on arXiv.

What they find is that given an initial mass M, the minimum lifetime of a black hole is at least M 4 /ℏ 3/2, which is a surprisingly simple result. The first is that of standard Hawking radiation, the second is a transition phase, and the third is the entanglement phase.

The broader interest lies in turning an observational clue into something that can be weighed against competing models of the underlying physics. Astrophysics does not have the luxury of controlled experiments; everything is inferred from radiation that traveled across cosmic distances under conditions that cannot be reproduced in a terrestrial laboratory. This makes the interpretation chain longer and more uncertain than in bench science, but it also means that a well-constrained measurement of an extreme object carries theoretical information that no earthbound experiment can provide.

Depending on the nature of quantum gravity, black holes could enter a metastable period where the redshift factor of their radiation becomes negative. Eugenio Bianchi et al, Minimum lifetime of a black hole, arXiv (2026).

Because this item comes through Phys. org Space as science journalism, it should be treated as contextual reporting rather than primary evidence. Good science reporting can identify why a result matters, connect it to the wider literature and make technical work readable, but the decisive evidence remains in the original paper, dataset, mission release or technical record. That distinction is especially important when a story is later repeated by aggregators, because repetition increases visibility, not evidential strength.

The next step is to see whether independent datasets and physical modeling converge on the same interpretation. Multi-wavelength follow-up, combining X-ray, radio and optical data where possible, is typically what separates a compelling detection from a robust physical characterization. In high-energy astrophysics, results that initially looked definitive have been revised when data from a second messenger arrived; the current result should be read with that history in mind.

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