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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 27 2019, @12:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the first-find-the-worm dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How to spot a wormhole (if they exist): Physicists propose that perturbations in the orbit of stars near supermassive black holes could be used to detect wormholes

Such pathways could connect one area of our universe to a different time and/or place within our universe, or to a different universe altogether.

Whether wormholes exist is up for debate. But in a paper published on Oct. 10 in Physical Review D, physicists describe a technique for detecting these bridges.

The method focuses on spotting a wormhole around Sagittarius A*, an object that's thought to be a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. While there's no evidence of a wormhole there, it's a good place to look for one because wormholes are expected to require extreme gravitational conditions, such as those present at supermassive black holes.

In the new paper, scientists write that if a wormhole does exist at Sagittarius A*, nearby stars would be influenced by the gravity of stars at the other end of the passage. As a result, it would be possible to detect the presence of a wormhole by searching for small deviations in the expected orbit of stars near Sagittarius A*.

"If you have two stars, one on each side of the wormhole, the star on our side should feel the gravitational influence of the star that's on the other side. The gravitational flux will go through the wormhole," says Dejan Stojkovic, PhD, cosmologist and professor of physics in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences. "So if you map the expected orbit of a star around Sagittarius A*, you should see deviations from that orbit if there is a wormhole there with a star on the other side."

[...] While current surveillance techniques are not yet precise enough to reveal the presence of a wormhole, Stojkovic says that collecting data on S2 over a longer period of time or developing techniques to track its movement more precisely would make such a determination possible. These advancements aren't too far off, he says, and could happen within one or two decades.

Stojkovic cautions, however, that while the new method could be used to detect a wormhole if one is there, it will not strictly prove that a wormhole is present.

"When we reach the precision needed in our observations, we may be able to say that a wormhole is the most likely explanation if we detect perturbations in the orbit of S2," he says. "But we cannot say that, 'Yes, this is definitely a wormhole.' There could be some other explanation, something else on our side perturbing the motion of this star."

Though the paper focuses on traversable wormholes, the technique it outlines could indicate the presence of either a traversable or non-traversable wormhole, Stojkovic says. He explains that because gravity is the curvature of spacetime, the effects of gravity are felt on both sides of a wormhole, whether objects can pass through or not.

Dai's work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China, National Basic Research Program of China, and the Shanghai Academic/Technology Research Leader program, and Stojkovic's work by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Journal Reference: De-Chang Dai, Dejan Stojkovic. Observing a wormhole. Physical Review D, 2019; 100 (8) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.100.083513


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  • (Score: 1) by catholocism on Sunday October 27 2019, @06:16PM (4 children)

    by catholocism (8422) on Sunday October 27 2019, @06:16PM (#912480)

    Presuming that gravitational waves traverse wormholes is a big assumption. Great if accurate, but assumption nonetheless.

  • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday October 27 2019, @06:32PM (3 children)

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday October 27 2019, @06:32PM (#912487) Journal

    This caught my attention too -- especially since they also have to traverse a black hole. I started a thread above and there's a some responses now, but I can't quite get people to make the full connection. You can throw in your two cents too to see if you jar some information from someone.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 27 2019, @07:45PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday October 27 2019, @07:45PM (#912507)

      I don't have a problem with the gravitational waves traversing the wormhole - if a wormhole is interesting at all, "things" have to be able to move through it in some form or another, and gravitational waves, or photons, would seem to be some of the more durable small things in our universe.

      What I do have a problem with is the idea that objects "on the other side" could have anything but negligible far field effects on objects on this side. Those photons, and gravitational waves, and quark soup or whatever else can make it through the wormhole are traversing a small-ish aperture. Unless there's a big star just about to be sucked into the black hole on the other side, I wouldn't expect a large measurable effect on this side, particularly in a region as obscured as Sag-A.

      This feels a little bit like "told-ya-so" grabbing, something we might come to observe 10,000 years from now, and these guys just want to be noted in the history books as "having predicted it first."

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      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 27 2019, @10:53PM (1 child)

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday October 27 2019, @10:53PM (#912540) Journal

        An effect need not be large to be measurable. The effect of Neptune on Uranus certainly is very small, yet it was large enough to predict Neptune from the movement of Uranus.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 27 2019, @11:52PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday October 27 2019, @11:52PM (#912556)

          The Neptune effect traversed wide open free space, at short range.

          My point is: when you pass gravitational waves through an aperture, presumably attenuating them significantly somewhere in the vicinity of a black hole... it's going to take more than Neptune at a range of ~12AU to make wobbles in the other stars that are: A) ridiculously hard to observe from this vantage point already due to the intervening masses, and B) next to the largest black hole we know of in the galaxy which is flinging around mass quantities of difficult to measure matter, light and dark, in its general vicinity.

          So you see a wobble in a core star's orbit, do you first assume that wobble is due to a core star on the far side of a potential wormhole, or is that wobble more likely to come from something on this side that's hard to see because of it's dramatically reduced mass requirement to make that wobble?

          I forget, are we still going with uniform mass distribution in black holes, or are they allowed to be lumpy?

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