I know ya’ll heard of wormholes, tunnels in the fabric of the cosmos that connect one region of the universe to another. These ain’t just the fanciful dreams of impressionable young astrobods: wormholes represent real solutions of Einstein’s equation of general relativity. If general relativity is correct, wormholes ought to be out there somewhere.

But how to spot ’em? It’s easy to imagine that a wormhole, being a kinda hole in spacetime, would be indistinguishable from a black hole. Turns out that ain’t the case. Alexander Shatskiy, an astrothinker from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, says wormholes are fundamentally different from black holes because they have no event horizon. He’s even worked out what a wormhole should look like.

The key difference is that light entering one end of a wormhole comes out at the other but in a highly characteristic way. The angular intensity distribution of this light has a minimum at the center, regardless of wavelength. This allows background stars to shine through giving the wormhole the appearance of a semi-transparent hollow sphere (see image above).

Where to look? Shatskiy suggests that the next generation of supersensitive radio telelscope interferometers should have the resolution capable of distinguishing black holes from wormholes in active galactic nuclei.

So the message to all you radio astronomers out there is: keep ’em peeled.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0712.2572: Passage of Photons Through Wormholes and the Influence of Rotation on the Amount of Phantom Matter around Them

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 6:16 am and is filed under Changin' the world, Seein' the light. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.