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from the it-keeps-getting-more-complicated dept.
Zilong Li and Cosimo Bambi with Fudan University in Shanghai have come up with a very novel idea--those black holes that are believed to exist at the center of a lot of galaxies, may instead by wormholes. They've written a paper [abstract], uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, describing their idea and how what they've imagined could be proved right (or wrong) by a new instrument soon to be added to an observatory in Chile.
From the article:
Back in 1974, space scientists discovered Sagittarius A* (SgrA*) - bright source of radio waves emanating from what appeared to be near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Subsequent study of the object led scientists to believe that it was (and is) a black hole - the behavior of stars nearby, for example, suggested it was something massive and extremely dense.
What we're able to see when we look at SgrA* are plasma gasses near the event horizon, not the object itself as light cannot escape. That should be true for wormholes too, of course, which have also been theorized to exist by the Theory of General Relativity. Einstein even noted the possibility of their existence. Unfortunately, no one has ever come close to proving the existence of wormholes, which are believed to be channels between different parts of the universe, or even between two universes in multi-universe theories. In their paper, Li and Bambi suggest that there is compelling evidence suggesting that many of the objects we believe to be black holes at the center of galaxies, may in fact be wormholes.
Plasma gases orbiting a black hole versus a wormhole should look different to us, the pair suggest, because wormholes should be a lot smaller. Plus, the presence of wormholes would help explain how it is that even new galaxies have what are now believed to be black holes - such large black holes would presumably take a long time to become so large, so how can they exist in a new galaxy? They can't Li and Bambi conclude, instead those objects are actually wormholes, which theory suggests could spring up in an instant, and would have, following the Big Bang.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday June 01 2014, @10:32PM
Forgive me if I've missed something but it seems their argument hinges on the idea that black holes are more numerous and smaller than predicted so some of them must be wormholes.
Ok, let's go with that logic for a moment.
My question is, if wormholes act like black holes but are dumping the incoming mass somewhere else in the universe/multiverse then why don't we also see the exit wormholes, which would presumably be very bright objects - maybe white holes?
Maybe this is a candidate for gamma ray bursters, I guess as the material got accelerated through a wormhole it would emerge with quite a bang from the other end, then again this would probably produce a jet of material, which as far as I know has not been observed from objects other than candidate black holes.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday June 02 2014, @08:34AM
> My question is, if wormholes act like black holes but are dumping the incoming mass somewhere else in the universe/multiverse then why don't we also see the
> exit wormholes, which would presumably be very bright objects - maybe white holes?
So what is it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07 2014, @05:36PM
Meanwhile, in another part of the multiverse, astrophysicists are pondering the question: "We reckon white holes are a sort of space-time wormhole, but where does their energy/matter come from?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07 2014, @09:09PM
How about the big bang? We had one of those, seemed like a fair amount of matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08 2014, @06:45AM
OK, so bad form to reply to one's own post, but I've been toying with this in the back of my brain. So, suppose we're dealing with wormholes instead of black holes. Suppose further that my earlier supposition that the "exit" is a new universe, a big bang resulting in a new aspect of the multiverse. Let's consider our own universe. You can only see back so far, 13.8 billion years or so. It's an event horizon, sort of in the opposite direction of a back/worm hole's.
So, maybe a star undergoes gravitational collapse, becomes a singularity with an event horizon in our universe, everything blows out as the big bang of a sort of pocket universe. The event horizon prevents interaction, a boundary between universes, so to speak.
Take it a little further. If the above is true, then the singularity would contain, effectively, the compressed spacetime of another universe collapsed to a single point. If that singularity comprised the entirety of the space and time of another universe, then anything that EVER fell below the event horizon in our universe must ALWAYS have existed in the "pocket" universe (if something gets blasted into the timeline of another universe, wouldn't it make sense that it existed in EVERY time in that universe, which would keep with the conservation of energy of that universe [can't have new matter just blasting in from a white hole from another universe, breaks the rules]).
So the tidal forces at the event horizon in our universe rips matter apart for billions of years, drops it below the event horizon into the singularity that is another universe, and the entirety of everything that ever fell below that event horizon pops out as the big bang of a new universe.
This is, of course, all wildly speculative, but it's a fun thought experiment with all kinds of interesting consequences.