End of universe sooner than once thought, research says

This just in: The end is near(er) than we thought.

Turn back the ultimate doomsday clock by more than a thousand megaannum — that’s the millennium equivalent of 1 million years — so 1,000 megaannum would be 1 billion years.

If research by Dutch scientists published this week meets muster, the universe will end in about 10 to the power of 78 years — exponentially sooner than 10 to the power of 1,100 years that was the prevailing estimate for the end of the universe.

The paper, published in the May issue of the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, is innocuously titled “An upper limit to the lifetime of stellar remnants from gravitational pair production.”

It uses theories pioneered by English physicist Stephen Hawking, known for his 1988 work “A Brief History of Time,” to determine when white dwarf stars — the longest lasting body in the universe — would die out.

The answer, according to Heino Falcke, Michael F. Wondrak and Walter D. van Suijlekom, is 10 to the power of 78 years.

Here’s what that looks like: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

The end of the world as we know it will come much, much sooner, as scientists believe the world will end in about 1 billion years. That’s when the sun’s heat will deplete Earth’s oxygen supply.

The news about the universe, reported by CBS and other international outlets, landed with a whimper, not a bang: As of Wednesday, the 16 page paper had 1,043 downloads.