Introduction | Wormhole (2024)

FAQs

What happens if I enter a wormhole? ›

If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole in space, you won't be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But you may have just enough time to send a message to the rest of us from the other side, researchers report in the Nov. 15 Physical Review D.

They proposed the existence of tunnels or bridges through the space-time fabric. These tunnels could join two distant points in the universe. Thus, creating a weird shortcut that could minimise distance and travel time. Later, they were named wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges.

For the wormhole metric, ds2 = -dt2 + dr2 + (b2 + r2)(dθ2 + sin2 θ dφ2).

The throat might be a straight stretch, but it could also wind around, taking a longer path than a more conventional route might require. Einstein's theory of general relativity mathematically predicts the existence of wormholes, but none have been discovered to date.

Theoretically, a wormhole might connect extremely long distances such as a billion light-years, or short distances such as a few meters, or different points in time, or even different universes.

Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system. But scientists have observed black holes ripping stars apart, a process that releases a tremendous amount of energy.

By their calculations, quantum mechanics could feasibly turn the event horizon into a giant wall of fire and anything coming into contact would burn in an instant. In that sense, black holes lead nowhere because nothing could ever get inside.

Yes, you heard it right — a wormhole is sort of a portal.

So there we have it. On our current understanding of the Universe, we could potentially travel into the future, but travelling into the past may well be a total no-no. The only remaining loophole is that the theories this is based on are incomplete.

It is important to note that the researchers did not generate a physical wormhole. No objects were transferred through extra dimensions. Instead, what was demonstrated was quantum behavior.

Do white holes exist? ›

The negative square root solution inside the horizon represents a white hole. A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large ball that could hold a few million Earths.

The closest known black hole to Earth is a stone's throw away, just 1,600 lightyears distant. Dormant black hole Gaia BH1 lies only 1,600 lightyears away, making it the closest known black hole to Earth.

In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Spacetime diagrams are useful in visualizing and understanding relativistic effects, such as how different observers perceive where and when events occur.

Some physicists have attempted to combine quantum mechanics with the General Theory of Relativity and concluded that black holes may not contain a 'singularity', the point at which density becomes infinite. This would open up the possibility that black holes are shortcuts to other universes.

But, in theory, it is impossible to travel through a wormhole without invoking “exotic” effects such as time travel. Moreover, if a wormhole connects two black holes – and black holes absorb everything in proximity – how then could you escape the force of gravity on the other side?

While scientists have no evidence that wormholes actually exist in our world, they're good tools to help astrophysicists like me think about space and time. They may also answer age-old questions about what the universe looks like.

It is highly unlikely that you could enter a wormhole and survive. A wormhole is created by gravity so great that it bends space until you pinch the universe and come out on the other side.

A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other. Instead of traveling for many millions of years from one galaxy to another, under the right conditions one could theoretically use a wormhole to cut the travel time down to hours or minutes.