A recent cosmological model combines two of the most eccentric ideas in contemporary physics to explain the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe. To understand it, it's necessary to look beyond the Big Bang we all know and consider two concepts that rarely intersect: cyclic universes and primordial black holes. A Different Kind of Multiverse

There are different versions of the “multiverse.” The most popular model—that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—proposes that there are as many universes as there are possibilities and that these versions of reality are parallel. Physics proposes something more sober and mathematically consistent: the cosmic bounce.

In this model, the universe is not born from a singularity, but expands, contracts, and expands again in an endless cycle. Each “universe” is not parallel, but sequential—that is, one arises from the ashes of the previous one.

Is it possible for something to survive the end of its universe and endure into the next? According to a paper published in Physical Review D, yes. Author Enrique Gaztanaga, a research professor at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, shows that any structure larger than about 90 meters could pass through the final collapse of a universe and survive the rebound. These "relics" would not only persist, but could also seed the formation of giant, unexplained structures observed in the early stages of the present-day universe. Moreover, they could be the key to understanding dark matter.

For decades, the dominant explanation for dark matter has been that it is an unknown particle or particles. But after years of experiments without direct detections, physicists have begun to explore alternatives. One of them proposes that dark matter is not an exotic particle, but an abundant population of small black holes that we overlook.

The idea is appealing, but it has a serious problem. For these black holes to explain dark matter, they would have to exist from the earliest moments of the universe, long before the first stars could collapse. There are indications that these objects could exist, but a convincing physical mechanism to explain their origin is lacking. A Universe Born With Black Holes

This is where Gaztanaga’s newly proposed model shines. If cosmic bouncing allows compact structures to survive the collapse of the previous universe, then the current universe would have already been born with pre-existing black holes. They would not have to have been generated by extreme fluctuations or finely tuned inflationary processes, but would simply have been there from the first instant.

The assumption has the potential to solve two riddles at once: the origin of black holes and the nature of dark matter. If this model is correct, dark matter would not be a mystery of the early universe but rather a legacy of a cosmos that predates our own.

"Much work remains to be done," Gaztanaga, also a researcher at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, said in an article for The Conversation. "These ideas must be tested against data—from gravitational-wave backgrounds to galaxy surveys and precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background."

"But the possibility is profound," he added. “The universe may not have begun once, but may have rebounded. And the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be relics from a time before the Big Bang.”

Gareth Gore was on a research trip to California earlier this year when he was told to expect a call from the Vatican arranging a one-on-one audience with the pope.

Gore was stunned. In 2024 he published the book Opus, a meticulously researched and gripping account of the abuses allegedly perpetrated by Opus Dei, the highly secretive Catholic group started by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá in the 1920s. Over a century Opus Dei established itself as a deeply religious order that, they claim, helps ordinary people “love God and serve others through work well done, carried out with honesty and integrity”. ‘I became like a slave’: why 43 women are suing the secretive Opus Dei Catholic group in Argentina Read more

Gore’s book lays out claims the organisation is at the heart of a conspiracy involving child grooming, human trafficking, and psychological and emotional control, with former members saying the group used private confessions as leverage against members and drugged those under its sway – claims Opus Dei categorically denies. Gore reported that Opus Dei collaborated closely with the bloody dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain, before supporting rightwing causes around the world.

Gore laid much of the blame for these alleged abuses with the wider Catholic church, which relied on Opus Dei for financial support in the 1970s and in return gave it freedom to operate as a legitimate branch of Catholicism, but outside the Vatican’s normal structures. In 2002, Escrivá was made a saint after ferocious lobbying by Opus Dei, despite much protest from within the Vatican, as abuse allegations mounted and some Catholic leaders began to raise questions about the organisation.

Gore believes Opus Dei would never have been able to function without the complicity of the Vatican – which made the invitation from Pope Leo all the more surprising. A man wearing glasses preaches to a crowd of people Josemaría Escrivá preaches in 1972 in Barcelona, Spain. Photograph: Getty Images

Gore began reporting on Opus Dei almost by accident. He was a financial journalist looking into the collapse of Banco Popular, one of Spain’s largest banks, in 2017. At the time, the world couldn’t understand how such a pillar of European banking had failed so spectacularly. Gore discovered that the bank had been hijacked by Opus Dei since the 1940s (the bank’s chair was a lifetime member, as were many on its board, and companies controlled by Opus Dei turned out to be the bank’s largest shareholders). Opus Dei had used the bank “as its personal cash machine”, Gore alleged, “siphoning off” funds to finance its expansion around the world. (The trial of Banco Popular’s former leadership, facing allegations of fraud, is scheduled to begin in Spain’s national court in 2027. For its part, Opus Dei has denied that it was involved in the management of the bank and said it “does not get involved in commercial activities”.)

Through hundreds of interviews with former Opus Dei members, Gore’s book traces how from the 1950s onwards, Banco Popular’s wealth went into creating a vast recruitment network targeting children and vulnerable teenagers, building palatial Opus Dei centres across the world, and eventually forming one of the most formidable clandestine political influences in the US. Its US members would become crucial in eroding reproductive rights, funding the Washington march that led to January 6, and heavily influencing Project 2025, according to Gore’s reporting.

Who knows how much information actually gets to [the pope]. Opus Dei is renowned for having penetrated the Vatican

Gareth Gore

Gore’s book also sheds light on the inner workings of Opus Dei. Its most religious members, called numeraries, live in single-sex dormitories in a life of servitude and self-flagellation: they fast for dangerously long periods, wear a small spiked chain called a cilice around their thighs, and whip themselves with ropes, former members told Gore. Every element of their life is strictly controlled and manipulated by the group’s leader and senior priests, Gore said. Mental illness, common in an atmosphere of constant physical and psychological abuse, was treated with a reported cocktail of antidepressants, sedatives and even Rohypnol, according to claims made by victims in interviews Gore conducted.

Female members known as “numerary assistants” – women and girls from mostly underprivileged backgrounds – staffed the Opus Dei residencies, working long days cooking and cleaning. Many of them were allegedly cut off from their families, transported internationally and, in many cases, expected to give their entire salaries to Opus Dei in an operation that Gore believes meets the UN definition of human trafficking. Some made claims to Gore of sexual abuse.

In Argentina, federal prosecutors are leading an investigation into senior leaders of Opus Dei who they accuse of overseeing the exploitation and trafficking of women and girls; Opus Dei in Argentina set up a “healing and resolution” office to hear the women’s complaints. In 2024 it also said allegations that girls were coerced into joining the organization on promises of education at its schools were “false and misleading”. Opus Dei said it was committed to safeguarding minors and vulnerable adults.

Most Opus Dei members don’t live in these conditions. These “supernumeraries” can marry and live in their own homes. The most critical mission of the numeraries is to recruit supernumeraries to make large donations back to Opus Dei and influence politics and society to further Opus Dei’s conservative goals. An Opus Dei priest in Washington DC, who Opus Dei acknowledged has credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, oversaw the 2009 conversion of the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Catholicism. A cross within a circle symbolizing the Earth and a rose beneath The Opus Dei coat of arms. Photograph: Eric Vandeville/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

In a statement to the Guardian, Opus Dei’s US communications director said: “There are cultural spheres from which the reality of faith cannot be understood. In this case, a financial journalist interprets the reality of the Church through an economic and political lens. Unless the dimension of faith is taken into account, one cannot understand the Church … at the same time, we firmly reject the serious allegations contained in the book Opus. The book contains numerous errors, distortions, and unfounded allegations.”

The organization previously denied claims that it “exercise[s] control of its members’ political and business dealings”. It has also denied that it is a “secretive” organization.

I spoke to Gore, who lives in London, two weeks after his 16 March visit to the Vatican about what happened when he met Pope Leo.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve spent almost a decade compiling this dossier on Opus Dei that implicates the Vatican. How on earth does it happen that you’re invited to present these findings to the pope?

Honestly, I don’t know. I was on a work trip in the States and I got a call from somebody I know in Peru who’s quite close to the pope. And he had heard from the pope himself, that the pope wanted to meet me and to hear more. I remember putting the phone down and having to take a moment: is this for real?

I was told to contact someone at the Vatican who would arrange the meeting. So I sent this message, still thinking: no one’s going to reply to this. And almost immediately I got a message from someone quite senior inside the Vatican who was like, “Yeah, yeah, the Holy Father has told me absolutely that he wants to meet you. Let me know what dates might work.”

It was then a pretty stressful lead-up to the meeting. Not because I was stressed about meeting the pope, but because I felt this weight on me. Having conducted this investigation over the course of five years, having spoken to literally hundreds of former members of Opus Dei and having unearthed all of these secret documents about the way that this group operates, I felt this weight to ensure that he received all this information.

How much do you think Pope Leo already knows about the organization?

Who knows how much information actually gets to him. Opus Dei is renowned for having penetrated the Vatican. It’s highly likely there are people there who are limiting what information gets to the pope – perhaps for malicious reasons, but also, as with any other kind of big company or big institution, sometimes it’s better that the boss doesn’t know everything so that there can be some kind of deniability.

I think [the pope] quite clearly wanted to send a signal to Opus Dei that he’s taking these allegations seriously

Gareth Gore

In the limited time you had to speak with Pope Leo directly, what was the central story that you wanted to tell him?

I think people on the outside don’t realize the founder of this movement, this Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá, told his members that the idea for Opus Dei had come directly from God. He’d received this vision which he wrote down in meticulous detail.

These writings are the source of all of this control and manipulation and political manoeuvring that’s ongoing today. And so without understanding the internal documents, internal rules, and without understanding that the members truly believe that these rules came directly from God, it’s impossible to understand the mentality of how Opus Dei works. So I was trying to convey that message to [the pope], while also trying to explain why reforming this group will be unbelievably difficult, because the founder is revered as a saint, which he is. He was made a saint by the Vatican in 2002.

So the pope can’t just say, “You guys have got to stop doing this,” because the true believers will continue believing that all of these practices and all of this manipulation is what God wants of them.

How does one hammer things home to the pope? Did you feel like you had the freedom to be persuasive, or do you have to adopt a respectful tone?

I went into the meeting with this kind of burden of wanting to really get this information to him, but I had this attitude of not giving a damn. Maybe I want to rephrase that: I was unafraid of offending him or of breaching etiquette. I just thought: no one else has been given this opportunity and if they throw me out after five minutes, I can live with that because I’ve tried to do what I think is right.

But I had no idea about how he would respond to me ambushing him with this huge pile of papers, these internal documents and me giving him a very clear, full, unvarnished account of what life in Opus Dei was really like. I didn’t know whether he’d be pressing his button, getting his secretary to come in and show me out.

How did he respond?

Honestly, the meeting could not have gone any better. He asked a number of very incisive questions. It went on for much longer than was scheduled. There were two cameramen there. And at the end of the meeting, the pope said to me that it had been his decision to invite the cameras in and to make the meeting public. I think he quite clearly wanted to send a signal to Opus Dei that he’s taking these allegations seriously. Three men pose together From left: Josemaría Escrivá, Pope John XXIII, and Don Alvaro Portillo, the second head prelate of Opus Dei, pose together in 1960 in the Vatican. Photograph: Vatican Pool/Getty Images

Opus Dei is only 100 years old, and perhaps the reason it’s not treated like other groups of the 20th century that have accused of cultlike behaviour is the seal of religious authority that has been stamped on it by the Vatican. Does the Vatican have real powers to rein in Opus Dei if it chose to?

The Vatican helped to create this monster, not least Pope John Paul II because he saw them as political allies in his conservative crusade. He saw them almost like his personal green berets that he could send off to any part of the world where there was some kind of progressive priest or bishop who was causing trouble. He could send Opus Dei there to do his work or be his eyes and ears. He gave them this special status that has never been granted before or since in the history of the Catholic church.

What is that status?

He made them into this thing called the “personal prelature”, which basically meant that they were answerable to no one but the pope. They could operate anywhere they wanted to in the world and any abuse allegations against [Opus Dei] couldn’t be handled in the normal way through the local bishop or archbishop. Ordinary Catholics welcome this group into their homes, they allow their kids to go to its schools, they attend its meetings because [it has] this stamp of approval from the Vatican.

Pope Francis, to his credit, started to take action [before his death in April 2025]. He issued a papal decree in 2022 where he basically ordered Opus Dei to get its house in order. But there was no effort to speak with any former members, no effort to speak with journalists such as myself who investigated the group.

The point I was trying to make to Pope Leo is that if you’re trying to solve a problem, the first step is to understand exactly what the problem is. Which is why I suggested to him that the next logical step would be to open a full independent investigation into all allegations of abuse [by Opus Dei] – whether they are spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical.

This is a group that is by invitation only and they target the elites: politicians, judges, business people, journalists, academics

Gareth Gore

Prosecutors are starting to look into the organization too.

Certainly in Argentina, public prosecutors there have conducted a two-year investigation into the allegations made by 43 or 44 women. And after the investigation, these public prosecutors concluded that there were absolutely grounds to charge the group with human trafficking and serious labour offences. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Since the Argentina allegations have come out, we’ve had more women coming forward in places like Ireland, Mexico, France, Spain.

Opus Dei operates about 300 [private Catholic] schools around the world, including in the UK and the US. Not far from my home in south London there are two Opus Dei schools where kids my kids’ age go. The next big step is for governments and for social services to really look into safeguarding practices at these schools and to begin to ask questions about whether this group, which is accused of very serious abuses and crimes, is fit to be looking after young kids and young adults. I would argue that it absolutely is not.

One of the things you’re pushing for is for the canonization of Escrivá to be undone? Would that be terminal for Opus Dei?

Unfortunately people are brainwashed into believing certain things, so whether removing the sainthood of Escrivá would result in this group just dying out, I’m not sure. But it would go a long way to removing this stamp of legitimacy and approval from the Vatican. If all the Vatican does is make a few tweaks around the edges but leaves this guy as a saint, that’s going to send very mixed messages. We have [the founder’s] actual writings in black and white where these practices are not only outlined but mandated and ordered of the membership, which is why this is such an enormous headache for the pope.

People might think that this is an obscure religious group that has little to do with them. Opus Dei says it does not take political positions other than the stances of the Catholic church. But you describe them as having pivotal influence when it comes to the makeup of the supreme court and abortion.

The founder of Opus Dei made it clear that he saw his followers as part of a militia who were going to enter into battle against what he called the “enemies of Christ”. So right from the beginning, this is a political group that uses religion as almost a veneer to hide behind – controlling and manipulating the membership to get them to do things that might benefit Opus Dei politically or financially.

In places like Washington, [Opus Dei has] made a real concerted effort to infiltrate the corridors of power and has been immensely successful. I would argue that today, Opus Dei within the Maga Republican movement is one of the pre-eminent forces. There are several very high-ranking figures inside the White House and the wider Maga ecosystem who are either full-on members of Opus Dei or big supporters. People like Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation [and the force behind Project 2025], is a regular at the Opus Dei centre in central DC and gets his spiritual direction from them. You’ve got Leonard Leo, who helped to orchestrate the conservative takeover of the supreme court and sits on the board of the Opus Dei centre in central Washington. The list goes on.

This is a group that is by invitation only and they target the elites: politicians, judges, business people, journalists, academics.

What’s ironic is that you have the leader of the Catholic church speaking out against war and against the way that immigrants are being treated. That shows this co-option of the Christian identity by Opus Dei to be a complete fallacy; it’s all for political expediency. It’s about these people’s own deeply authoritarian and conservative views about how the world should be run.

Sexologist Shere Hite wrote one of the best-selling books of all time, The Hite Report; transformed the lives of millions of people through her eye-opening findings about the female orgasm; then vanished from public awareness in the course of a mere 50 years. That, at least, is the argument of a new book by the London-based academic Rosa Campbell, The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared, as well as a 2023 Dakota Johnson–narrated documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite. The framing of both these works is tricky; to say that no one talks about or remembers a thinker of the relatively recent past is a fuzzy practice, as it depends entirely on who you know and talk to. I happen to remember Hite and her books quite well, but Campbell—who appears to be younger than I am—maintains that when she told her colleagues and friends that she planned to write about Shere Hite, she got nothing but blank looks in response, and we’ll have to trust her on that.

Hite, born in 1942 to an unmarried teenage mother, was largely raised by her grandparents: devout, working-class Christians who frequently reminded her of her sinful origins. Later, Hite’s grandfather divorced her grandmother on the grounds that she’d refused him sex. As Campbell astutely observes, Hite learned early on that women walk a sexual tightrope: “If you had too much sex, you could be shunned like her mother was; if you didn’t have enough, you could be deserted like her grandmother.” Intellectually ambitious, Hite studied history at the University of Florida, then attempted grad school at Columbia, but encountered condescending attitudes from her fellow grad students and teachers, who all seemed to have gone to Ivy League colleges and looked down on anyone who hadn’t. She dropped out and from that point onward, Hite’s research was conducted independent of any academic institution.

Campbell is at her best when invoking the countercultural ferment of New York City in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Hite barely scrounged together a living working as a commercial model in ads for bodywash and posing for pulp-novel book covers. Eventually, she realized there was more money and less work in nude photos. She’d wanted to write a history of women’s sexuality while at Columbia, and these jobs provided her with additional insight into how sex shaped women’s lives. Even so, the exhausting work of maintaining a photogenic standard of beauty—the exercises, the hairdresser appointments, the home manicures, the false eyelashes that had to be applied one at a time every morning—consumed much of the time she’d hoped to devote to her work.

And Hite was beautiful, with long legs and a mane of rose-gold Pre-Raphaelite curls. She favored an extravagantly romantic and feminine personal style—lace gowns, white fur, gauzy florals, and satin, all of it vintage and scavenged from thrift stores. Her editor at Knopf, Regina Ryan, knew who Hite was even before she knew Hite was a writer. They lived in the same neighborhood, where Hite was a regular and mesmerizing sight on the street. At their first lunch meeting, Hite walked into the restaurant looking like “a shepherdess from a French eighteenth century opera, not a real shepherdess, but a beautiful shepherdess, singing.” The other diners stopped to take in this vision, which proved even more fascinating when Hite proceeded to talk all through lunch, in her distinctive high-pitched voice, about vulvas and orgasms.

The selling point of The Hite Report in 1976 was the stack of 3,000 anonymous questionnaires Hite had collected from women across the country. She distributed them willy-nilly, riding a motorbike, to people on the streets and via women’s groups, including the National Organization for Women, which she joined after she learned they were protesting a particularly irksome typewriter ad for which Hite had modeled. NOW provided some institutional support for her research, though many members considered her focus frivolous compared to more pressing issues like reproductive freedom and workplace discrimination. Campbell describes Hite printing up the questionnaire—in rainbow ink on “pastel-colored scrap paper” and decorated with “hearts, cupid bows and arrows and starbursts”—at “the 24-hour gay anarchist printing press and commune Come!Unity Press in the East Village. There was no door on the bathroom (privacy was bourgeois!), but there was a large risograph, which movement people could use if they provided their own ink.”

Hite’s findings contained a particularly explosive revelation: A significant majority of her respondents could not achieve orgasm through “heterosexual intercourse” alone—or, as Hite described it, a man “mounting and thrusting”—and required clitoral stimulation to come. While this hardly seems controversial today, in the 1970s, it ran counter to widespread public beliefs fostered by psychiatry. Freud claimed in 1905 that clitoral orgasms were “immature” and full womanhood could only be achieved with the acceptance of the feminine role embodied in the vaginal orgasm. Porn tended to reinforce this conviction, although in 1966 Masters and Johnson would conclude that all female orgasms are clitoral orgasms. The cover of The Book That Taught The World To Orgasm. The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared

Hite wasn’t the first to highlight this reality for the public. Anne Koedt, a major figure in New York’s radical feminist circles, published an essay called “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” in 1970. But Hite had collected thousands of personal statements from women to back it up, and in a confessional form more palatable to a general audience than laboratory findings or political screeds. Many respondents admitted to faking orgasm during intercourse either because they were unwilling to tell their partners what they needed or because men were unreceptive to their requests. “What are you, a policewoman?” one woman’s lover said to her when she tried to redirect him. “Do I fake?” another wrote to Hite. “Like asking if the sky is blue.”

These first-person testimonials to widespread sexual dissatisfaction caused a sensation. That was further stoked by Hite’s utterly tireless publicity efforts, launched after a (male) publicist declined an interview request on her behalf because he felt the book’s subject was too “ticklish” for TV. A gorgeous blonde happy to appear on broadcast television to talk about sex and the clitoris turned out, unsurprisingly, to be catnip for producers everywhere.

Campbell rightly points out that Hite framed women’s disenfranchisement in the bedroom as a symptom of their overall second-class status, and that The Hite Report is an inherently feminist work, even if it doesn’t address a conventionally political issue. More than a few of Hite’s readers wrote her to explain that her book led them into feminist activism. The Hite Report’s sexy subject matter and glamorous author attracted readers, many of them men, who might not have picked up a copy of The Feminine Mystique, and they wrote to Hite that she had changed their views on gender relations. Last but far from least, many, many people reported to her that she had sparked a dramatic improvement in their sex lives.

The conservative backlash of the 1980s hit Hite particularly hard. So harsh was the response to her perfectly innocuous third book, 1987’s Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, that several prominent feminists—including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Ntozake Shange—signed an open letter declaring that they considered the attacks on Hite to be covertly aimed “at the rights of women everywhere.” Nevertheless, Campbell is often too quick to dismiss criticism of Hite’s haphazard methodology. Of course, the type of anecdotal research—or any research on human sexuality, really—that Hite performed simply can’t be conducted in a rigorously scientific manner. And of course, the willingness of respondents to write about their most intimate lives and send the results off to a stranger precludes meticulous sampling. Nevertheless, Hite herself invited critique by presenting her statistics in misleading ways, allowing the 70 percent of women who responded to her questionnaire reporting that they could not orgasm from penis-in-vagina intercourse alone to be elided into 70 percent of all American women. This could well be true, but Hite hadn’t proven it.

Hite was also a victim of her own celebrity—or, rather, her own unskillful handling of that celebrity. Watching the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, Hite concluded that “any woman who talks about ‘sex’ deserves what she gets” in the eyes of the American public. But Nancy Friday—whose compilation of women’s self-reported sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, was published three years before The Hite Report and who is mentioned only in passing in Campbell’s The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared—doesn’t seem to have suffered the same vitriol during that particular vibe shift. The Hite Report, more importantly than its sexual content, amounted to a criticism of straight men and their lack of sexual knowledge. Which makes it all the more surprising that Hite, in 1987, agreed to appear on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which the entire audience consisted of men mad about feminism. (Also: WTF, Oprah?)

Furthermore, Hite was remarkably thin-skinned and had a habit of storming out of any broadcast interview in which she felt she had been slighted. She could be capricious and diva-like, once interrupting an interview with a journalist to send an underling off “to fetch her a coffee cup from a distant room because it was so much prettier than an almost identical cup in front of her.” Worst of all, Hite acquired a reputation for venting her temper on service workers, and “would turn against waitstaff or scream at taxi drivers, publicists, and staff on the lower rungs at publishing houses who sometimes refused to work with her.” In one notorious incident, she punched a limo driver whom she’d kept waiting for an hour, when he had the temerity to tell her they wouldn’t reach a taping of The Sally Jessy Raphael Show on time. Then she got mad when Phil Donahue insisted on querying her about the fracas.

The media—or at least, the media that was—is like the ocean. You can gain a lot from it and even make your living by it, but always on its terms, never on yours. Hite could not see this. The same outlets that happily capitalized on her beauty and frank talk on sexual matters were also delighted to make hay out of her outbursts and scandals. Campbell, who seems more than a little under the spell of her subject, speculates that Hite’s painful childhood led her to seek public acclaim as a substitute for the love she lacked in her early years, and plenty of magnetic stars have fueled their charisma with such longing. Hite certainly had charm in spades: In one particularly adorable moment, an old boyfriend of Hite’s moons to Campbell over his ex’s penmanship: “If the word ‘cursive’ means anything, it means her handwriting.”

While sexism played some role in the decline of Hite’s career, it was hardly the only factor. Her first book was a wonder of perfect timing, arriving at just the moment when the world was ripe to receive it. Her follow-ups—Women and Love and a book on male sexuality—lack the revelatory quality of the original The Hite Report, and she didn’t have the institutional affiliation and support to continue research in other, less mediagenic areas, perhaps with more statistical rigor. Fatally, Hite made the mistake of believing that being covered is the same thing as being loved and admired.

But, despite these setbacks, Hite ultimately succeeded. The key point of The Hite Report—that the clitoris is the central organ of female sexual response and pleasure—is common knowledge today. Hardly anyone now remembers the time when women berated themselves for their “abnormality” because they couldn’t reach orgasm from penetrative vaginal intercourse alone. Even if many people under 40 have apparently not heard of it, The Hite Report never truly disappeared. Because now, it’s everywhere.

A new study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics by three researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands has dramatically revised our estimate of when the last objects in the universe will cease to exist.

That is a 1 followed by 78 zeros.

It sounds incomprehensibly long, and it is.

But it is also vastly shorter than the previous estimate of 10¹¹⁰⁰ years, which is a 1 followed by 1,100 zeros.

To put that difference in perspective: the gap between those two numbers is so enormous that no analogy from everyday life can adequately capture it.

The previous estimate was not just slightly wrong.

It was wrong by a margin that makes the difference between a second and the current age of the universe look trivial by comparison.

And the reason for the revision is a process called Hawking-like radiation, which turns out to apply not just to black holes, as was previously assumed, but to almost everything in existence. What Is Hawking Radiation, and Why Does It Matter?

In 1975, physicist Stephen Hawking proposed something that contradicted what many physicists believed about black holes.

He argued that black holes are not completely black. They leak. Very, very slowly. Hawking radiation 33a5ec1 An illustration showing what generates Hawking radiation. Credit: Getty Images

The popular explanation, the one Hawking himself used in talks and books, involves pairs of virtual particles that pop into existence near the edge of a black hole.

At the edge of a black hole, two temporary particles can form, and before they merge, one particle is sucked into the black hole and the other particle escapes, producing what is called Hawking radiation.

The particle that escapes carries energy with it.

That energy has to come from somewhere, and the somewhere is the black hole itself.

Over extraordinarily long timescales, the black hole loses mass and eventually evaporates entirely.

This contradicts Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which says that black holes can only grow.

It is worth noting that physicists now understand the virtual particle explanation to be a useful simplification rather than a fully accurate picture of what is happening.

The true mechanism is more subtle, involving the way that curved spacetime and quantum uncertainty interact to produce radiation from any region where gravity bends space strongly enough.

But the outcome is the same: black holes slowly radiate away their mass, and given enough time, they disappear. The 2023 Discovery That Changed Everything

The new study builds directly on a 2023 paper by the same trio: black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom.

In that earlier paper, they made a significant and surprising claim.

Hawking radiation is not unique to black holes.

Any object with a gravitational field can, in principle, evaporate via the same process.

They showed that not only black holes, but also other objects such as neutron stars, can evaporate via a process akin to Hawking radiation.

That finding raised an immediate follow-up question from the scientific community and from curious members of the public alike: if everything evaporates, how long does the process actually take?

After that publication, the researchers received many questions from inside and outside the scientific community about how long the process would take. They have now answered this question in the new article. How the Study Was Conducted

The team used mathematical calculations drawn from three different fields: astrophysics, quantum physics, and pure mathematics.

They worked through ten different types of objects, calculating from first principles how long each would take to evaporate via Hawking-like radiation in an ideal environment with no other influences.

The calculations further showed that the evaporation time of an object depends only on its density.

That is a deceptively elegant result.

It means that the clock for how long an object lasts has nothing to do with its size, its composition, or its history.

Only its density determines its fate. Findings From the Study

The results produced a table of cosmic lifetimes that is simultaneously mind-bending and strangely clarifying.

The most significant finding concerns white dwarf stars, which the researchers identify as the last survivors in the universe.

White dwarf stars dissolve in about 10⁷⁸ years. Previous studies, which did not take this effect into account, put the lifetime of white dwarfs at 10¹¹⁰⁰ years.

White dwarfs are the dense, cooling remnants left behind when stars like our Sun have exhausted their nuclear fuel. opo9532c A Hubble Space Telescope colour image of a small portion of the cluster only 0.63 light-years across reveals eight white dwarf stars among the cluster’s much brighter population. White dwarf stars, the dense cooling remnants of stars like our Sun, are predicted to be the last stellar objects to evaporate via Hawking-like radiation, dissolving after about 10⁷⁸ years. About 97% of Milky Way stars will end up as white dwarfs.

They are not actively burning anything.

They are simply cooling down, extremely slowly, over immense stretches of time.

Approximately 97 percent of the stars in the Milky Way will eventually become white dwarfs.

They are, in essence, the embers of the universe.

And according to this new research, those embers will finally go cold and vanish at around 10⁷⁸ years. The Counterintuitive Finding About Black Holes

One of the most striking results in the paper concerns the relative lifetimes of neutron stars and black holes.

Common sense would suggest that black holes, with their extraordinarily powerful gravitational fields, should evaporate faster via Hawking radiation.

A stronger gravitational field should produce more radiation.

More radiation should mean faster decay.

But the calculations produced a surprising result. Black Hole b707c6a

To the researchers’ surprise, neutron stars and stellar black holes take the same amount of time to decay: 10⁶⁷ years. This was unexpected because black holes have a stronger gravitational field, which should cause them to evaporate faster.

The reason turns out to come down to geometry.

Black holes have no surface. They reabsorb some of their own radiation, which inhibits the process, said co-author and postdoctoral researcher Michael Wondrak.

A neutron star has a surface.

Radiation that leaves a neutron star is gone, contributing to the evaporation process without being recaptured.

A black hole, by contrast, has an event horizon, and some of the radiation it produces loops back inward and is reabsorbed.

The two effects cancel each other out, and the two objects end up with essentially the same lifespan.

This is not a trivial result.

It tells us something fundamental about the relationship between the geometry of objects and the rate at which they decay. What Makes This Genuinely Surprising

Most people, when they think about the death of the universe, picture it as something that happens to the grand structures: the galaxies, the clusters, the supermassive black holes at the heart of everything.

The intuition is that ordinary matter, the atoms, the rocks, the planets, will long outlast the exotic celestial objects.

The new research overturns that intuition in an interesting way.

Because the researchers were at it anyway, they also calculated how long it takes for the Moon and a human to evaporate via Hawking-like radiation. That is 10⁹⁰ years.

That is longer than the 10⁷⁸ years it takes a white dwarf to dissolve.

So in the Hawking radiation picture, the Moon and a hypothetical human body would outlast the last stars in the universe.

Of course, the researchers note with characteristic understatement that there are other processes that may cause humans and the moon to disappear faster than calculated.

Practically speaking, neither the Moon nor any human will be around in anything close to 10⁷⁸ years.

The Sun will swell into a red giant in about five billion years, consuming the inner solar system.

But taken purely as a calculation of Hawking-like evaporation in ideal conditions, the math tells us that less dense objects take longer to decay.

Since the Moon and a human body are far less dense than a white dwarf, they would take longer to evaporate via this mechanism.

It is a result that is genuinely funny if you think about it too long How This Applies to Our Understanding of the Universe

The study is clear that it addresses only Hawking-like radiation in isolation.

The actual end of the universe involves many other processes, some of which are better understood and some of which remain deeply mysterious.

The long-term fate of the cosmos depends on the nature of dark energy, the behaviour of protons over cosmological timescales, and phenomena that current physics cannot fully predict.

But what this research does is establish something important: the upper limit on how long stellar remnants can last.

Even if every other physical process were somehow paused, Hawking-like radiation alone would guarantee the universe cannot persist beyond approximately 10⁷⁸ years.

That is why the paper is titled precisely as it is: an upper limit to the lifetime of stellar remnants.

Professor Walter van Suijlekom, professor of mathematics at Radboud University, adds that the research is an exciting collaboration of different disciplines and that combining astrophysics, quantum physics and mathematics leads to new insights. “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.”

That last point is the deeper motivation behind the work.

Hawking radiation has never been directly observed.

It is almost certainly undetectable with any instrument that currently exists or that could be built in the foreseeable future, because for stellar-mass black holes the radiation is far too faint to measure against the cosmic background.

Calculating its effects across the full range of objects in the universe, and identifying unexpected results like the equivalence of black hole and neutron star lifetimes, is one of the few ways physicists can probe and test the theory indirectly. Holding the Numbers in Mind

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from trying to comprehend numbers like 10⁷⁸.

The universe is currently about 13.8 billion years old, which is roughly 10¹⁰ years.

The new estimate for the end of the universe is 10⁷⁸ years, which means the time remaining is longer than the current age of the universe by a factor of about 10⁶⁸.

That is a 1 followed by 68 zeros.

Every event that has ever occurred in the history of the cosmos, from the Big Bang to the formation of the first stars, from the emergence of life on Earth to this very moment, has taken place within the first 10⁻⁶⁸ of the universe’s total lifespan under the new estimate.

We are, cosmically speaking, in the very earliest fraction of a fraction of a second after the opening.

“So the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time,” said lead author Heino Falcke.

That statement is delivered with the calm of a scientist who has spent a long time sitting with these numbers.

It is also, in its quiet way, an unexpectedly reassuring thing to hear.

The universe will end.

But not for a very long time.

And somewhere in the mathematics of how it will happen, in the way that curved space leaks energy and density determines fate, there is a kind of deep order to the process that scientists like Falcke, Wondrak, and Van Suijlekom are working, patiently and across disciplines, to understand. More Findings from the Study

The paper itself establishes several additional findings that are worth unpacking carefully, because they reveal a picture of the universe’s fate that is considerably richer and stranger than the headline number alone conveys.

One of the most technically striking results in the study concerns the precise mathematical relationship governing how long objects last.

The researchers found that the evaporation timescale, which they denote as tau, scales with the average mass density of an object according to the relationship tau proportional to density to the power of negative three halves.

In plain terms, this means that denser objects evaporate faster, and less dense objects last longer, regardless of how large or massive they are. This is a genuinely counterintuitive result, because our everyday instinct is that heavier, denser things are more durable.

In the language of Hawking-like radiation, the opposite is true. A teaspoon of neutron star material, the densest ordinary matter in the universe at roughly 300 million tonnes per teaspoon, will vanish far sooner than a region of diffuse interstellar gas spread across light-years of space.

The paper provides a cascade of specific lifetimes that make this density dependence vivid and almost philosophically disorienting.

Neutron stars, the collapsed remnants of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae, have densities in the range of 3.3 times 10¹⁴ grams per cubic centimetre. Their evaporation timescale under the new calculation is approximately 10⁶⁸ years.

White dwarfs, which are less dense because they are the remnants of lighter stars like our Sun, evaporate in approximately 10⁷⁸ years.

The Moon, with a density of about 3.4 grams per cubic centimetre, a density comparable to granite, would take approximately 3 times 10⁸⁹ years to evaporate.

An object with the density of water would last approximately 10⁹⁰ years.

The Local Interstellar Cloud, the diffuse bubble of gas and plasma in which our solar system currently sits, with a density of roughly 5 times 10⁻²⁵ grams per cubic centimetre, would persist for approximately 10¹²⁷ years.

A supercluster dark matter halo, representing the largest and most diffuse gravitationally bound structures in the universe, would survive for approximately 10¹³⁵ years.

These numbers establish a clear and elegant ordering. The universe does not end all at once. It unravels in sequence, with its densest objects dissolving first and its most diffuse structures persisting almost unimaginably longer.

The white dwarfs that define the study’s headline result sit at a middle point in this sequence. They are the last dense stellar objects to disappear, but they vanish long before the most rarefied cosmic structures reach the end of their allotted time. The Explosive End of Neutron Stars

One of the more dramatic implications buried in the paper concerns what actually happens to neutron stars at the end of their evaporation.

The researchers note that neutron stars have a minimum stable mass, approximately 0.1 solar masses, below which they cannot maintain structural stability. As a neutron star slowly loses mass through Hawking-like radiation over the course of 10⁶⁸ years, it gradually approaches this critical threshold.

For a neutron star, the evaporation process can continue only until their minimum mass is reached, when it will explode and produce an observable burst of high-energy particles and neutrinos.

This is a remarkable detail.

The death of a neutron star under this process is not a quiet fade into darkness but an explosive event, a burst of high-energy particles and neutrinos marking the moment when the object finally crosses the boundary of instability.

The paper notes soberly that given the timescales involved, no neutron star formed in our current universe would ever reach this end point through Hawking-like radiation alone. The timescale is simply too vast.

But the possibility exists as a theoretical endpoint, and it connects the most exotic prediction of the study to the observable physics of energetic astrophysical transients.

White dwarfs, the paper notes, would meet a similar explosive fate as they approach instability at the end of their 10⁷⁸-year lifetime. What the Density Formula Reveals About the Very Early Universe

The density-based formula for evaporation time has an implication that points backwards in time rather than forwards.

The study calculates that primordial objects with densities above approximately 3 times 10⁵³ grams per cubic centimetre should have dissolved by now.

That threshold density, which the paper calls the maximum quasi-stable density for the present age of the universe, is an extraordinary number in its own right. It is roughly 10³⁹ times the density of a neutron star, and sits far below the Planck density, which represents the density at which quantum gravity effects are expected to dominate.

The implication is that if any extremely dense objects formed in the very early universe, perhaps in the exotic conditions of the first moments after the Big Bang, they would not have survived to the present day.

They would have decayed through gravitational pair production on timescales shorter than the current age of the universe.

This places the new research in dialogue with cosmological models of the early universe and with questions about what primordial objects might have existed in those first moments. If such high-density primordial relics had formed, the Radboud team’s calculations suggest they are already gone. The Question of Fossil Remnants From Previous Universes

The paper takes one further speculative step that is worth dwelling on, because it touches on questions that push right to the boundary between established physics and deep cosmological uncertainty.

Some theoretical frameworks propose that our universe may not be the first or only universe, and that some form of cyclical or recurrent universe formation might have occurred.

In such a scenario, stellar remnants from a previous universe, what the paper calls fossil stellar remnants, might in principle have survived into our current universe.

Fossil stellar remnants from a previous universe could be present in our current universe only if the recurrence time of star-forming universes is smaller than about 10⁶⁸ years.

This is the lifetime of a neutron star under the new calculations.

The logic is as follows. If a neutron star forms in a previous universe and survives into ours, then the time between that previous universe and ours must be shorter than the time it takes a neutron star to evaporate. If the gap between universes exceeds 10⁶⁸ years, no neutron star could survive the crossing.

The paper notes that such fossil objects would not be quietly sitting in space doing nothing. By the time our universe reached its current age, they would be accreting material from the intergalactic medium and the cosmic microwave background, growing rather than shrinking.

The researchers suggest that surveys designed to detect isolated stellar remnants, for example through gravitational microlensing, might in principle be used to search for or rule out such fossil populations, which would place constraints on multiverse scenarios.

The paper acknowledges frankly that this remains speculative, and that the likelihood of actually detecting such objects is presumably small.

But the fact that a paper about Hawking radiation timescales can make contact with questions about the recurrence of universes is a reminder of how interconnected the deepest questions in physics tend to be. The Coupling Parameter and What It Changes

The study introduces a technical parameter called the gravitational coupling parameter, denoted xi, which describes how the quantum field responsible for the emitted radiation couples to the gravitational field of the object.

Two specific values of this parameter are particularly meaningful.

When xi equals zero, the field couples to gravity in a minimal way, and this represents something like graviton-like emission, particles that couple to the curvature of spacetime itself.

When xi equals one-sixth, the field is conformally coupled, meaning it responds to gravity in a way that is scale-invariant, and this is more representative of photon-like emission.

The paper finds that the total energy emitted depends on which coupling is assumed, with graviton-like coupling producing significantly more emission from the interior of a compact object than photon-like coupling does.

For a neutron star-like object, graviton-like coupling can produce interior emission that is an order of magnitude higher than the exterior emission alone. For photon-like coupling, the interior contribution is still present but contributes only a factor of roughly 1.5 above the exterior emission.

This matters for interpreting the results because the precise lifetime of a given object depends on which type of field is dominant in the evaporation process. The headline number of 10⁷⁸ years for white dwarfs is calculated for the graviton-like coupling case.

The paper explicitly states that the coupling parameter introduces a scaling factor of at most 2.5 in the total energy flux, meaning that the lifetime estimates are correct to within roughly an order of magnitude regardless of which coupling value is most physically appropriate.

For a popular science discussion, the key takeaway is that the headline numbers are robust estimates rather than precise predictions, but they are not just rough guesses. The underlying mathematics constrains them within a factor of a few in any direction.

The Surface Emission That Black Holes Cannot Produce

One of the genuinely new theoretical contributions of this paper, as opposed to simply applying an existing framework to new objects, concerns the distinction between how black holes and non-black-hole objects emit radiation.

For a black hole, the only radiation an observer at a great distance can measure is the component that escapes directly from the region around the event horizon. There is no surface. The radiation passes through nothing on its way out.

For a neutron star or white dwarf, there is an additional radiation component.

Particles produced in the exterior space that cannot escape are absorbed by the compact object, increasing and redistributing its internal energy, leading to a surface emission with a blackbody spectrum.

This surface emission is absent from black holes by definition, because black holes have no surface. The radiation either escapes or falls in, and there is no physical boundary to absorb and re-emit.

The paper finds that for neutron-star-like objects at typical compactness, the surface emission component can be comparable to or even larger than the direct emission component, particularly for the graviton-like coupling case.

This is not just a technical detail. It represents a qualitative difference in the physical mechanism by which black holes and stellar remnants lose energy, even though the overall timescales turn out to be comparable. The Connection to the Information Paradox

The paper closes with an observation that opens onto one of the deepest unresolved problems in theoretical physics: the black hole information paradox.

The information paradox arises from the tension between two foundational principles. Quantum mechanics requires that information cannot be destroyed.

General relativity suggests that anything falling into a black hole is permanently inaccessible. If black holes evaporate completely through Hawking radiation, the information they swallowed appears to be gone forever, which violates quantum mechanics.

For black holes, this paradox has been debated for fifty years without resolution.

For neutron stars and white dwarfs evaporating via the Radboud mechanism, the situation is if anything more complicated.

Given that the emission of virtual pairs is separated from the location of decaying matter within the limits of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that it is not a priori clear which of the two particles escapes or is absorbed by the surface, it is not immediately obvious how quantum information can be preserved within the context of gravitational pair creation.

Further work is needed to address these fundamental questions.

This is the paper ending not with a settled answer but with a genuinely open question.

The mechanism by which neutron stars and white dwarfs decay does not obviously preserve information, because the connection between the decaying matter deep inside the object and the radiation emitted far from its surface is mediated by quantum fluctuations in the spacetime itself.

Tracing the information content of the original object through that process is not straightforward, and the authors are candid that they do not yet have a solution. Why This Research Is Worth Taking Seriously

It would be reasonable to ask how much weight to place on calculations about events so remote in time that they bear no conceivable practical relevance to anything that could ever be observed or tested.

The researchers themselves address this directly in the paper.

Like Hawking radiation, this effect is not experimentally verified and there is little hope that this can ever be achieved for macroscopic objects, apart from experiments in analog gravity.

Analog gravity experiments create laboratory systems, often using flowing fluids or ultracold atomic gases, that mimic certain mathematical properties of curved spacetime.

These experiments have provided indirect support for some aspects of Hawking radiation physics, but they cannot directly test the evaporation of astrophysical objects.

The value of the research lies not in its practical applications but in what it reveals about the internal consistency and reach of physical theory.

When the same mathematical framework that describes Hawking radiation for black holes is extended to neutron stars and white dwarfs, it produces finite, calculable lifetimes.

The fact that those lifetimes are internally consistent, scale with density in a clean mathematical relationship, and produce unexpected but interpretable results like the equivalence of neutron star and black hole lifetimes, is evidence that the underlying physics is meaningful rather than arbitrary. The Simple Question at the Heart of It

There is something admirable about the directness of the question this research set out to answer.

After the 2023 paper showing that Hawking-like radiation applies to all objects with a gravitational field, the most natural follow-up question was: how long does it take?

The answer required combining astrophysics, quantum field theory on curved spacetime, and pure mathematics into a single calculation framework. It produced a result that was simultaneously reassuring and staggering.

The universe will end.

Everything in it will eventually dissolve through the slow, patient action of quantum fluctuations in the fabric of space itself.

But the timescales involved are so vast that they make the current age of the universe look like the first moment of the first second of the first day of creation.

As the paper’s lead author said with characteristic understatement: the ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time.

That combination of rigour and quiet wit, doing the calculations dead-seriously and with a wink as the Radboud University press release put it, captures something important about how physics at the frontier of human knowledge actually gets done.

The universe is decaying.

Every object in it is slowly dissolving into radiation through a process so faint that it produces roughly one proton’s worth of decay in the Moon every 10⁴⁰ years.

And three physicists in Nijmegen sat down, did the mathematics carefully and correctly, and told us when the last ember will finally go out.