We have heard about wormholes in movies like Interstellar but do they really exist in reality. Well, scientists say they do exist in the real world.
Wormholes are the imaginary tunnels through space-time that enables travel from one universe to another, as seen in the movie. But the researchers say the only difference is that unlike movie, traveling through them in real may be impossible.
‘Interstellar, a film based on novel by Kip Thorne, shows astronauts fleeing the Earth after its destruction and moving to a distant galaxy using a wormhole.
When Thorne was writing the novel, he had consulted Carl Sagan for in-depth research on the topic. The duo had also worked on another novel featuring a wormhole, Carl Sagan’s Contact.
Albert Einstein and his assistant Nathan Rosen have proposed the concept of Wormholes while attempting to create a unified model of nature that includes all forces in the universe.
Wormholes, also called Einstein-Rosen bridges, connect a black hole and a theoretical white hole from both the ends.
The theory, which was published in a 1935 paper, described the wormholes as tunnels that connected two separate regions of space-time. But it was rejected as a “theory of everything” in the dearth of accurate prediction of the particle behavior.
Physicist John Wheeler had in the 1960s introduced the term ‘wormhole’ to explain the theoretical tunnels. These tunnels were compared with the holes created by the worms in apples that allow the insects to pass through the fruits’ interiors rather than around their surfaces.
Black holes are the dead remains of massive stars following supernova explosions. As they are similar to the wormholes’ openings as describe by Einstein and Rosen, some scientists also assumed they could be utilized as portals to other places in space time or even other universe.
Unlike single black holes, the Einstein-Rosen bridges require more than the single star’s collapse for the formation. Hence, traveling through them becomes a bigger problem.
Researchers explain anything coming close to a black hole, especially within an area called the event horizon, is pulled apart by the extreme gravitational force. It means space travellers would die if they try to enter it.
