"You’ll get to know the difference when you either die or you pass through."
A team of physicists from Sofia University in Bulgaria say
that wormholes, which are hypothetical tunnels linking one part of the universe
to another, might be hiding in plain sight — in the form of black holes, New
Scientist reports.
Black holes have long puzzled scientists, gobbling up matter
and never letting it escape.
But where does all of this matter go? Physicists have long
toyed with the idea that these black holes could be leading to “white holes,”
or wells that spew out streams of particles and radiation.
These two ends could together form a wormhole, or an
Einstein-Rosen bridge to be specific, which some physicists believe could
stretch any amount of time and space, a tantalizing theory that could rewrite
the laws of spacetime as we understand them today.
Now, the researchers suggest that the “throat” of a wormhole
could look very similar to previously discovered black holes, like the monster
Sagittarius A* which is believed to be lurking at the center of our galaxy.
“Ten years ago, wormholes were completely in the area of
science fiction,” team lead Petya Nedkova at Sofia University told New
Scientist. “Now, they are coming forward to the frontiers of science and people
are actively searching.”
The team’s newly developed computer model, as detailed in a
new paper published in the journal Physical Review D, suggests the radiation
emanating from the discs of matter swirling around the edges of wormholes may
be near impossible to distinguish from those surrounding a black hole.
In fact, the difference in the amount of light polarization
emitted by a black hole and a wormhole, at least according to their model,
would be less than four percent.
“With the current observations, you cannot distinguish a
black hole or a wormhole — there may be a wormhole there, but we cannot tell
the difference,” Nedkova told New Scientist. “So we were looking for something
else up there in the sky that could be a way to distinguish black holes from
wormholes.”
While Nedkova and her colleagues suggest there may be ways
to distinguish between them with observations in the future. For instance, we
could look for light that may be spilling in from the other end of the wormhole
and emanating out of the black hole in the shape of small rings of light.
But for now, we simply don’t have the technology to make
those kinds of direct observations of black holes.
The only way to really tell for sure would be to scan these
celestial oddities with an even higher-resolution telescope.
The other option, of course, would be to risk it all by
flinging yourself into a black hole.
“If you were nearby, you would find out too late,” Nedkova
told the publication. “You’ll get to know the difference when you either die or
you pass through.”