Imagine two cities located on opposite sides of a mountain. In order to visit each other, the inhabitants of these cities will probably have to drive around the mountain. But if they want to go faster, they can tunnel through the mountain to create a shortcut. That’s the idea of a wormhole.
A wormhole can be described as a tunnel between two distant points in our universe, reducing travel time from one place to another. In theory, instead of traveling from one galaxy to another over millions of years, given the right conditions, one could use a wormhole to reduce the travel time to hours or even minutes.
Ready for the trip? Michael Taylor/Shutterstock
Since wormholes represent shortcuts through space-time, they could even function as time machines. You could come out of one end of a wormhole before entering it.
Although scientists have no evidence that wormholes actually exist in our world, they are good tools to help astrophysicists think about space and time. They could also answer very old questions about the nature of the universe.
Fiction or Reality?
Because of these fascinating properties, many science fiction writers use wormholes in their novels or films. Scientists, however, were just as enthusiastic about the idea of wormholes as artists. Scientists call the entry and exit points of a wormhole “mouths”, while they refer to the tunnel itself as the “throat”. Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library
Although researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, wormholes are solutions to important physics equations. Solutions to the equations underlying Einstein’s theory of spacetime and general relativity involve wormholes. This theory describes the shape of the universe and how stars, planets and other objects move in it. Because Einstein’s theory has been tested countless times and proven correct each time, some scientists expect that wormholes exist somewhere in the universe.
But other scientists think that wormholes cannot exist because they would be too unstable.
The constant pull of gravity affects all objects in the universe, including the Earth. So gravity would also act on wormholes. Scientists skeptical of them believe that unless a force pushing from the inside out thwarts that force, the center of the wormhole would collapse under its own gravity after a short time. The most likely way to do this is to use so-called “negative energies” which would counteract gravity and stabilize the wormhole.
But from what scientists know, negative energies can only be generated in amounts far too small to counteract a wormhole’s own gravity. It is possible that the Big Bang created tiny wormholes containing small amounts of negative energies at the beginning of the universe, and that these wormholes expanded over time as the universe expanded.
Although wormholes are interesting objects, they are still not accepted by most scientists. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Black holes, whose existence is now proven, were not accepted when scientists first suggested their existence in the 1910s.
Einstein first formulated his famous equations in 1915, and German scientist Karl Schwarzschild found a way to describe black holes mathematically just a year later. However, this description was so peculiar that leading scientists at the time refused to believe that black holes could actually exist in nature. It took 50 years for people to start taking black holes seriously – the term “black hole” wasn’t coined until 1967, by the way.
The same could happen with wormholes. It may take time for scientists to agree on whether they exist or not. But if they find solid evidence of their existence – which they could do by observing the strange movements of stars’ orbits – this discovery will change the way scientists see and understand the universe.