Wormholes between black holes could be possible, based on a wild new theory reported first by LiveScience.
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The findings contradict previous predictions that these hypothetical shortcuts through space-time would collapse and thus weren¡¯t as stable.?
The change is based on the differences in the mathematics of relativity that¡¯s instrumental in describing wormholes, and in turn dramatically flip the overall phenomenon of their behaviour.
To the uninitiated, general relativity explains how a particular mass would behave over time due to gravity. It is entirely based on movement in space and time. Even though the rules of general relativity are standard, the theory provides a lot of freedom to describe those coordinates mathematically.?
Physicists call these descriptions ¡®metrics¡¯ -- they¡¯re like a map that shows how to reach a particular location. There could be numerous ways to reach a destination In each case the ¡®metric¡¯ differs, but it gets you to your final destination.
Physicists use these metrics to describe similar situations and at times, one particular metric helps more than the other.
For black holes and wormholes, there are a few potential metrics with the most popular one being the Schwarzschild metric -- the one where black holes were first discovered. But it has some strange math -- it behaves abruptly at a specific distance from the black hole dubbed the event horizon or Schwarzschild radius.
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When we say behaves abruptly, it means completely goes haywire to a point that it can no longer show a difference between different points in space and time. Another metric dubbed Eddington-Finkelstein metric shows what happens to particles when they reach the event horizon -- they pass right through and fall into the black hole, getting lost in oblivion.
But what about wormholes? Wormholes can be easily constructed by extending the idea of a black hole with its mirror image dubbed the white hole.?
First coined by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, just like a black hole doesn¡¯t let anything out of it, while holes don¡¯t let anything in them, and a wormhole can be created by simply joining the singularities of both the black and white holes. This creates a tunnel through space-time -- a highly misbehaving one.
After the existence of this theoretical wormhole, if you were to think what would happen when someone would walk through it, the answer is more complicated than that.
Wormholes, in general, are chaotic -- while holes -- which most likely don¡¯t even exist -- are unstable and extreme forces within the wormhole force it to stretch out and break the moment it forms, so the chances of it surviving are fairly limited.
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However, physicist Pascal Koiran at Ecole Normale Sup¨¦rieure de Lyon used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric instead, where he found that with this metric he could more easily track the path of a particle through a wormhole, albeit a hypothetical one. He found that the particle can cross the event horizon, enter the wormhole tunnel and escape through the other side, in a specific amount of time. All this with no misbehaviour at any point.?
Now, this doesn¡¯t make Einstein-Rosen bridges stable. But Koiran¡¯s result is interesting since it points out that wormholes aren¡¯t as catastrophic as we earlier believed and that they could have paths through the tunnels that perfectly allowed the presence of general relativity.
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