Wormholes may be lurking in the universe — and new studies are proposing ways of finding them

Context

• Nature may have found a way to create wormholes to keep the universe from expanding.Over the past few months, several new studies have suggested intriguing ways forward to find them.

What are Warmholes?

• In 1935, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen described how two sheets of space-time can be joined together, creating a bridge between two universes.
• This is one kind of wormhole and since then many others have been imagined.
• Black holes and wormholes are special types of solutions to Einstein’s equations, arising when the structure of space-time is strongly bent by gravity.
• Some wormholes may be ’traversable’, meaning humans may be able to travel through them.
• For that though, they would need to be sufficiently large and kept open against the force of gravity, which tries to close them.
• To push space-time outward in this way would require huge amounts of “negative energy”which exists and small amounts have already been produced in the lab.
• They may in fact even be time machines, providing a way to travel backwards – as suggested by the late Stephen Hawking in his final book.

How the Blackhole and the Warmhole differ?

• This is based on what would happen if matter coming out of one side of the wormhole collided with matter that was falling in. The calculations show that the crash would result in a spectacular display of gamma rays that we could try to observe with telescopes. This radiation could be the key to differentiating between a wormhole and a black hole.
• But black holes should produce fewer gamma rays and eject them in a jet, while radiation produced via a wormhole would be confined to a giant sphere.
• Unlike a black hole, a wormhole may “leak” some gravity from the objects located on the other side.
• Unlike black holes which are a bit frightening as they trap everything that ventures in, wormholes may allow us to travel to faraway places faster than the speed of light.

How the Wormholes could be significant?

• It also crop up in quantum physics, which rules the world of atoms and particles.
• They appear to solve the “quantum information paradox”.
• They may even help us understand some of the deepest cosmic mysteries, such as whether our universe is the only one.