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posted by hubie on Friday November 18 2022, @02:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the time-to-fire-up-the-Rocinante dept.

"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 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."

Also see: Wormholes Could Be Hiding in Plain Sight

Journal Reference:
Valentin Deliyski, Galin Gyulchev, Petya Nedkova, and Stoytcho Yazadjiev, Polarized image of equatorial emission in horizonless spacetimes: Traversable wormholes, Phys. Rev. D, 106, 2022. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.106.104024


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Skwearl on Friday November 18 2022, @03:50AM (10 children)

    by Skwearl (4314) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 18 2022, @03:50AM (#1280292)

    Slow news day? What a bunch of silly nonsense.

    "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."
    You would never get near the event horizon of a black hole, as a functional human being, no matter what sci fi tropes would have you believe. The hard radiation would kill you long before the gravity distortion killed you.

    Black holes have long puzzled scientists, gobbling up matter and never letting it escape.
    well, that is a function of a black hole....why does it need to escape? Is it to satisfy some sense of order? The universe is vast, not short of matter, and in any time frame where humans are still around, the amount of matter 'trapped' in black holes is immaterial.

    I'm going for a walk outside, to look up at the stars and marvel.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday November 18 2022, @04:08AM (6 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 18 2022, @04:08AM (#1280296) Journal

    IIUC, a large enough black hole doesn't have a really strong edge to the gravity, unlike a smaller one. Of course, it would need to be both charged and rotating, but I think it's fairly safe to assume that all the big one are. The problem is the radiation. (So, no, you wouldn't be able to live through the transition, but it's because you can't take a bath in really high energy radiation, not because there's a cliff-edge of gravity, the way smaller black holes would have. IIUC (HA!) the sharpness of the transition is inversely proportional to the 4th power of the distance of the Schwarzschild limit from the center (because it's basically tidal stress).

    OTOH, this whole thing seems a bit unlikely unless they can identify some feature of the universe with the proposed white holes. Since they're talking about these things moving through time, I suppose you might be able to consider that they all lead back to the big bang. That could, I suppose, give you the universe as an infinite loop.

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by EJ on Friday November 18 2022, @05:36AM

      by EJ (2452) on Friday November 18 2022, @05:36AM (#1280301)

      Why does it have to be in the past? Maybe the white hole from the very first ever black hole is trillions of years from now. Perhaps the first white hole won't form until the last black hole in the universe finally evaporates. Once the heat death of the universe occurs, perhaps the first white holes emerge to begin a new cycle.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Friday November 18 2022, @07:19AM (4 children)

      by mhajicek (51) on Friday November 18 2022, @07:19AM (#1280307)

      If the matter falling into a black hole comes out another, but flowing backwards in time, it would look the same as two normal black holes.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
      • (Score: 2, Disagree) by EJ on Friday November 18 2022, @08:27AM (3 children)

        by EJ (2452) on Friday November 18 2022, @08:27AM (#1280310)

        Shut up, Christopher Nolan.

        Your movie was crap.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 18 2022, @08:40AM (2 children)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday November 18 2022, @08:40AM (#1280312) Journal

          It will always be better than Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
          • (Score: 3, Touché) by EJ on Friday November 18 2022, @09:31AM (1 child)

            by EJ (2452) on Friday November 18 2022, @09:31AM (#1280320)

            That's like saying, "Your cooking is better than dog food."

            • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2022, @12:41AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2022, @12:41AM (#1280424)

              It depends if you're a dog. Relativity, innit?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Friday November 18 2022, @08:35AM (1 child)

    by melikamp (1886) on Friday November 18 2022, @08:35AM (#1280311) Journal

    You would never get near the event horizon of a black hole, as a functional human being, no matter what sci fi tropes would have you believe.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole#Description [wikipedia.org]

    A human can travel inside a supermassive black hole just fine. I volunteer Elon Musk. If it's a wormhole, then he can loop around spacetime and bring us back a complete report and some souvenirs.

    On a completely different note, is soylent IRC borken?

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday November 19 2022, @07:26AM

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 19 2022, @07:26AM (#1280469) Journal

      On a completely different note, is soylent IRC borken?

      Yes - all the servers are being rebuilt [soylentnews.org] with up-to-date software.

      We are currently on libera.chat: irc.libera,chat/6697 ##soylentnews

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday November 18 2022, @06:26PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday November 18 2022, @06:26PM (#1280377)

    >You would never get near the event horizon of a black hole, as a functional human being, no matter what sci fi tropes would have you believe.

    What hard radiation? The radiation comes primarily from the superheated accretion disc - which most black holes don't have. Those only exist while a black hole is actively consuming something. The rest comes from intense tidal forces near the event horizon tearing apart even atoms - and such large tidal forces are only present around small black holes - one large enough for you to survive the tidal forces at the event horizon definitely isn't going to be tearing apart any atoms. The bigger the black hole, the weaker the tidal forces. For supermassive black holes you'd barely notice them on something as small as a person.