A new study published in the journal Physical Review D explains that humanity may have already seen wormholes , also called space-time tunnels because - at least in theory - they unite parts of space and time that are sometimes distant, allowing those who enter them to take a "shortcut" to places very far from each other.
A bit like the Fermi Paradox, scientists have wondered: but if wormholes are real, why haven't we found a single one in all this time? So four physicists tried to answer the question in the new paper. The solution is "simple" according to them: we have already seen them, but we have not been able to recognize them.
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| Time Tunnel illustration: Pixabay |
We may have mistaken them for black holes, as to find these cosmic monsters one notices their gravitational effects on the stars around them and the jets of material spewing out of their accretion disks. The authors think a wormhole would exhibit "a very similar polarization pattern" to that of a black hole.
So how do we tell these two seemingly similar objects apart? “More significant distinctions are observed for indirect images, where the intensity of the spacetime polarization of the wormhole can grow up to an order of magnitude relative to the Schwarzschild black hole,” say the study authors. In the future, more advanced models could reveal the differences between the two cosmic objects, but new studies on the subject are obviously needed.
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