If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole, you won’t be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But on the way, you may have just enough time to send one last message home. That’s the finding of a new analysis.
A wormhole is a tunnel in the fabric of space. It would link two points in the cosmos. Wormholes are just theoretical. That is, scientists think they could exist, but no one has ever seen one. If they do exist, wormholes could provide shortcuts to distant parts of the universe. Or they might serve as bridges to other universes. There even may be multiple types of wormholes, each with different features.
One of the most commonly studied types of wormholes is thought to be highly unstable. Physicists have expected it would collapse if any matter entered it. But it wasn’t clear just how fast that collapse might be. Also unknown: What would it mean for something, or someone, heading into the wormhole?
Now, a computer model has shown how this type of wormhole would respond when something travels through it. Researchers shared the results in the November 15 Physical Review D.
In theory, says Ben Kain, you could build a probe and send it through. Kain is a physicist at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. “You’re not necessarily trying to get [the probe] to come back, because you know the wormhole is going to collapse,” Kain says. “But could a light signal get back [to Earth] in time before a collapse?” Yes, according to the model he and his colleagues have created.
No need for ‘ghost matter’
Some past studies of wormholes hinted that these cosmic tunnels could stay open for trips back and forth, Kain says. But in those studies, wormholes needed a special trick to stay open. They had to be supported by an exotic form of matter. Researchers call the stuff “ghost matter.”
Like wormholes, ghost matter is only theoretical. In theory, it would respond to gravity in exactly the…
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