Also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a wormhole represents a shortcut through space and time. Science writers believe this is a shortened passage or tunnel between the two galaxies years apart. We explore the discovery of a wormhole.
The discovery of the first wormhole
According to El Pais, scientists have on numerous occasions theoretically demonstrated that this shortcut can be generated by creating two entangled black holes. On the other hand, a wormhole can be illustrated as two funnels joined at the narrow ends, with black holes situated at the wide mouths.
However, “unlike the wormholes in science fiction movies, they cannot transmit information or teleport matter because any message or object that goes in never reaches the other end”.
When a wormhole expands and contracts, anything trapped inside is annihilated and this means this destruction is typical of black holes which in turn don’t even allow light to pass through.
With that said, if a conventional interaction (transmitted at the speed of light) is established between two observers at opposite ends of the wormhole, it will open up in a manner that allows it to be traversed.
Different kinds of wormholes
Checking out different kinds of wormholes, it is documented that there is more than one wormhole. This comes from different theoretical implementations of theory of gravitation, these are called general relativity.
For example, one of the big distinctions in the types of wormholes that are described are whether or not they are traversable, which means whether you can go from one end to another.
“So yes, in that sense, there could be different types of wormholes”, argues space.com.
Has a wormhole ever been found? No, and that is the viewpoint of Robert Kehoe. He is a Professor, in the Department of Physics, at Southern Methodist University, adding that there is a substantial amount of evidence for the existence of black holes. But there’s been no wormholes found.
Are wormholes possible in theory?
The professor continues that a wormhole is thought to be essentially a tunnel from one place in space to another. When you have a massive object in spacetime, it basically creates a curvature of the spacetime in the nearby region.
As you get more and more mass, we expect that that curvature becomes more and more extreme.
“We think such objects occur in the universe, and they are what we call a black hole, where light cannot escape due to this extreme curvature of spacetime,” he adds.
“We think what happens is, at some point, if the mass of an object becomes large enough, the other forces of nature besides gravity can’t support the matter, and it becomes a black hole. You could think about this as one side of a wormhole.”
When was the wormhole theory created
Space.com makes it clear that wormholes were first theorized in 1916, though that wasn’t what they were called at the time.
While reviewing another physicist’s solution to the equations in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm realized another solution was possible.
He described a “white hole” a theoretical time reversal of a black hole. Entrances to both black and white holes could be connected by a space-time conduit.
More than 15 years later, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen used the theory of general activity to elaborate on the idea, proposing the existence of “bridges” through space-time.
Said Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon as he told LiveScience: “The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point. No one thinks we’re going to find a wormhole anytime soon.”
While Einstein’s theory of general relativity mathematically predicts the existence of wormholes, none have been discovered to date.
However, a negative mass wormhole might be spotted by the way its gravity affects light that passes by.