Wormholes serve as a tunnel between two zones of space-time, connecting two different times or places within the universe, or another universe entirely. That’s the theory, but they may not exist yet. Although they occupy a very prominent place in the world of science fiction and also scientific research, they have not yet been confirmed.
But wormholes are possible, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
But … what if they really existed? A team of astronomers from the University of Buffalo (USA) and the University of Yangzhou (China) has developed a way to detect wormholes in space; a way for us to see them.
Experts hope to be able to detect a wormhole around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A *. Do we have reason to think that our black hole contains one? Not really, but scientists believe that the extreme and turbulent gravitational conditions of a supermassive black hole might be the best place to run into a wormhole.
The new study provides a possible way to make the first detection: look for slight but strange motions of stars.
“If you have two stars, one on each side of the wormhole, the star on our side should feel the gravitational influence of the star on the other side,” explained Dejan Stojkovic, a cosmologist and professor of physics at the University at Buffalo in New York and co-author of the study. “The gravitational flow will go through the wormhole.”
These cosmic shortcuts require extreme warping of space-time, which in turn depends on very powerful gravitational forces. Therefore, Sagittarius A *, the giant of four million solar masses in our own Milky Way, may be a good place to start looking.
“If you map the expected orbit of a star around Sagittarius A *, you should see deviations from that orbit if there is a wormhole there with a star on the other side,” the expert clarified.
Mind you, Stojkovic points out that if we ever discover wormholes, they won’t be like science fiction has led us to imagine.
“Even if a wormhole is passable, humans and spacecraft probably won’t be able to get through,” he says. “Realistically, you would need a source of negative energy to keep the wormhole open, and we don’t know how to do it. To create a huge stable wormhole, you need … some magic.”
Passable or not, wormholes are an interesting theoretical phenomenon to study. While there is no experimental evidence that these cosmic passageways exist, they are possible, “a legitimate solution to Einstein’s equations.”
Can we then detect the presence of a wormhole?
According to Stojkovic, collecting data on the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole for quite some time or developing techniques to track its movement more precisely would make such a determination possible. These advances are not far off, he says, and could occur within a decade or two.
However, the expert cautions that while the new method could be used to detect a wormhole, it will not strictly test for its presence.
“When we achieve the necessary precision in the observations, we can say that a wormhole is the most likely explanation if we detect disturbances in the orbit of S2,” explains Stojkovic. “But we can’t say, ‘Yes, this is definitely a wormhole. There could be some other explanation, something else disturbing the motion of the star. “
Referencia: Observing a wormhole. De-Chang Dai, Dejan Stojkovic. Physical Review D, Vol. 100, Iss. 8 — 15 October 2019. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.083513
