Scientists believe that wormholes may be real, and we might know how to find them or might have even discovered them without realizing it, according to a report published in the journal Physical Review D.
Simulating images of wormholes
What is a wormhole?
When scientists talk about wormholes, they typically discuss two versions, with the most common being the space-time travel tunnel.
In 1935, physicist Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen first proposed the concept of wormholes. They suggested that a black hole acts as a gateway into a tunnel connected to a “white hole” on the other side of space, serving as an exit. Similar to how a black hole engulfs everything in its path, a “white hole” is believed to eject everything. The tunnel connecting the two points is known as the “Einstein-Rosen bridge.”
“These are the space-time tunnels that frequently appear in science fiction novels,” quoted Scientific American, citing physicist and wormhole researcher Brianna Grado-White from Brandeis University (Waltham/Boston, Massachusetts).
In science fiction, these tunnels are depicted as allowing rapid travel across thousands of light-years. Grado-White believes that if it were possible to traverse them, wormholes would enable someone to jump in and emerge at the other end, in a distant part of the universe.
However, experts analyze the prospect of opening these tunnels to be more challenging than it sounds. Due to the effects of gravity, these space-time bridges tend to collapse and crush any space travelers moving inside them.
Are wormholes real?
According to a new study published in the journal Physical Review D, a team of physicists at Sofia University in Bulgaria suggests that wormholes might be hiding somewhere on the other side of black holes, including the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way.
Using computer simulations, they argue that it is nearly impossible to distinguish between black holes and wormholes. This implies that almost any black hole could be opening a gateway into space-time, at least in theory.
The team of experts also discusses methods to detect wormholes, including the possibility of using data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) network to distinguish between wormholes and black holes.
Previously, the EHT captured the first image of Sagittarius A* and announced it earlier this year. The EHT is a network of eight radio telescopes spanning from the South Pole to Spain and Chile. It was also the machine that captured the first image of a black hole, M87*, in the Messier 87 galaxy in 2019.