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wormhole

SPACE: Are Traversable Wormholes Possible?

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Wormhole - Pixabay

Interested in scooting through a wormhole, the ultimate cheat-code through space and time? Perhaps you’d like to hop from star system to star system across the universe without breaking a sweat? But first, you’d better make sure your wormhole is traversable. “Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses,” João Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, told Live Science. Rosa is attempting to virtually “build” a stable, traversable wormhole, one that can be safely crossed without the theoretical passageway collapsing or trapping its occupant. And he … Read more

Building a Better Wormhole

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Wormhole - Pixabay

Wormholes, or tunnels in the fabric of space-time, are ferociously unstable. As soon as even a single photon slips down the tunnel, the wormhole closes in a flash.  But what if the problem was that our imagined wormholes weren’t quite weird enough?  A new study suggests that the secret to a stable wormhole is making them funny looking. By shaping the wormhole so that it’s not a perfect sphere, we might be able to hold that tunnel open for long enough to travel through. The only catch is that said wormhole would have to be incomprehensibly tiny. Down the hatch Wormholes, … Read more

The Turducken of the Cosmos

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Black Hole Wormhole - Deposit Photo

Astronomers think they might be able to detect black holes falling into wormholes using ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves, but only if wormholes actually exist and such a scenario ever happened, a new study finds. According to Einstein, who first predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, gravity results from the way in which mass warps space and time. When two or more objects move within a gravitational field, they produce gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light, stretching and squeezing space-time along the way. Gravitational waves are extraordinarily difficult to detect because they are … Read more

SPACE: Build Your Own Wormhole in Three Easy Steps

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Wormhole - Pixabay

Everybody wants a wormhole. I mean, who wants to bother traveling the long-and-slow routes throughout the universe, taking tens of thousands of years just to reach yet another boring star? Not when you can pop into the nearest wormhole opening, take a short stroll, and end up in some exotic far-flung corner of the universe. There’s a small technical difficulty, though: Wormholes, which are bends in space-time so extreme that a shortcut tunnel forms, are catastrophically unstable. As in, as soon as you send a single photon down the hole, it collapses faster than the speed of light. But a … Read more

SPACE: Are Black Holes Actually Colliding Wormholes?

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black hole - pixabay

When two wormholes collide, they could produce ripples in space-time that ricochet off themselves. Future instruments could detect these gravitational “echoes,” providing evidence that these hypothetical tunnels through space-time actually exist, a new paper suggests. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has already detected space-time ripples, called gravitational waves, emanating from merging black holes — discoveries that led to the Nobel Prize in 2017. But while LIGO’s detection was just one of many observations supporting the existence of black holes, these exotic objects still pose theoretical problems. For instance, they seem to be inconsistent with the laws of quantum mechanics. … Read more