In science fiction, space explorers usually hurtle through wormholes in space-time connected by two black holes—celestial objects so dense that even light cannot escape their clutches.
But do black holes really go inside wormholes? And will these wormholes look like their Star Trek counterparts?
The short answer is probably not, though mathematics The universe does not completely rule it out.
By themselves, the only thing that is in the center of a a black hole is a singularity — a point of infinite density.
In theory, however, a black hole could combine with a mirror twin called a white hole to form a wormhole. However, these theoretical wormholes won’t look anything like the ones depicted in science fiction – traditional wormholes are predicted to be incredibly unstable, meaning they will collapse the moment a single particle of matter enters them.
Some physicists predict that a wormhole could become more stable if it were formed from a spinning black hole, but our understanding of what happens in such a scenario is sketchy at best.
Einstein-Rosen bridges
Scientists first discovered black holes not through observations in the universe, but thanks to mathematics Einsteintheory of art general relativity. These equations showed that if you squeeze enough matter into a small enough volume, then gravity overwhelms all other forces and compresses matter into an infinitesimal point known as a singularity.
Black holes are one-way trips. Once someone crosses their boundaries, known as event horizons, they can never escape. Black holes were once considered simply a einstein’s equations trickastronomical observations eventually showed that black holes do exist in the universe.
But the same math also allows for the exact opposite of a black hole: a white hole. A white hole still has a singularity at its center and an event horizon around it. But instead of falling in and finding that there is no escape from a white hole, with a white hole one can never reach the event horizon outside because it is constantly ejecting its contents into the universe at faster than the speed of light.
The joining of paired singularities of a black hole and a white hole together forms the simplest kind of wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
Not very helpful
Unfortunately, Einstein-Rosen bridges are not very useful for crossing space. First, the entrance to the wormhole is beyond the event horizon. Since man cannot enter from the side of the white hole, he must fall into the black hole to enter. But once someone crosses the event horizon, they can no longer escape. This means that if you enter a wormhole, you will be stuck in it for eternity.
Another problem with Einstein-Rosen bridges is their stability. “This bridge is a wormhole of sorts, but it’s ephemeral: it squeezes out before any object can use it to get from one side to the other. So in that sense, there’s not really a wormhole because you can’t cross it, Sameer Mathur, a physicist at Ohio State University, told Live Science in an email.
This instability exists because creating a wormhole requires very precise and careful placement of matter. Anything that disturbs this delicate balance – even a single packet of light or photon – will cause the wormhole to collapse instantly. The wormhole will snap like a stretched rubber band at faster than the speed of light, preventing anything from moving through it.
In addition, physicists generally believe that white holes do not exist in our universe. Unlike their siblings, white holes are fantastically unstable. According to mathematics, as soon as even a single piece of matter falls on them, they explode instantly. So even if white holes were to form naturally, they wouldn’t last very long.
The combination of the uncertainty of the existence of white holes, the instability of Einstein-Rosen bridges, and their relative uselessness means that if wormholes exist, they are probably not Einstein-Rosen bridges.
A spinning singularity
Maybe there’s a way to build a wormhole out of a more complicated kind of black hole: consider their spin. All black holes spin, but New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr was the first to unravel the mathematics of black hole rotation.
At the center of a rotating black hole, extreme centrifugal forces propagate a point singularity into a ring. Perhaps this “ring singularity” could be the entrance to the wormhole, but again there is the problem of stability.
“The Kerr hole singularity is surrounded by an ‘inner horizon’, which in turn is surrounded by an ‘outer horizon.’ People believe that the inner horizon is not a stable concept, and that a small amount of infalling matter will completely change the region inside that horizon and thus also change the singularity,” Mathur said. “The ultimate outcome of this instability is not clear.” The problem is that as matter falls toward the ring singularity, it faces two competing effects: the enormous gravitational force of the singularity itself, and the extreme centrifugal force of the spin at the center of the black hole, which will act in the opposite direction. .
As you can imagine, this is not a very comfortable situation and things are likely to go wrong very quickly. The situation is so unstable that it may even completely prevent the emergence of a singularity. In this case, many physicists believe that the concept of a “ring singularity” from a spinning black hole will be replaced by a more concrete idea once we better understand these objects.
Originally published on Live Science.
