If wormholes exist, they can magnify the light of distant objects by up to 100,000 times — and that could be the key to finding them.
Wormholes are theoretical funnel-shaped portals through which matter (or perhaps spacecraft) can travel long distances. To imagine a wormhole, assume that all of the universe is a piece of paper. If your starting point is a dot at the top of the sheet and your destination is a dot at the bottom of the sheet, the wormhole will appear if you fold that sheet of paper so that the two dots meet. You can go through the entire sheet in one go, instead of traveling the entire length of the sheet.
Wormholes have never been proven to exist, but physicists have still spent decades wondering what these strange objects might look like and how they might behave. In their new paper, the researchers developed a model to simulate an electrically charged, spherical wormhole and its effects on the universe around it. The researchers wanted to know if wormholes could be detected by their observed effect on their environment. Their research was published on January 19 in the journal Physical Examination D (opens in new tab).
Related: The hunt for wormholes: How scientists search for space-time tunnels
The researchers’ model shows that wormholes, if they exist, could be large enough to trigger an aspect of Einstein’s theory of relativity: That massive objects bend the fabric of space-time to a degree that causes light to curve. This distorted light magnifies whatever is hidden behind the massive object, as seen from our perspective on Earth. This phenomenon is known as “microlensing,” and it allows scientists to use large objects, such as galaxies and black holeto view very distant objects, as stars and galaxies from the early universe.
In the paper, the researchers argue that wormholes, like black holes, would be massive enough to magnify distant objects behind them.
“The enlargement by distortion of a wormhole can be very large, which can be analyzed in a day,” lead author of the study Lei-Hua Liu (opens in new tab)a physicist at Jishou University in Hunan, China, told Live Science in an email.
Liu also noted that wormholes magnify objects in a different way than black holes, meaning scientists can distinguish between the two. For example, microlensing by a black hole is known to produce four mirror images of the object behind it. Microlensing through a wormhole, on the other hand, would produce three images: Two dim, and one very bright, the authors’ simulations showed.
However, since other objects – such as galaxies, black holes and stars – also produce a microlensing effect, finding a wormhole without clear clues about where to start looking is a difficult task, Andreas Karch (opens in new tab)a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
Trying to tease apart the microlensing caused by a wormhole compared to other large objects would be like “trying to detect the soft voice of a single person in the middle of a rock concert,” Karch said. He also noted that while the authors of the paper offer an interesting theoretical way to identify wormholes, “they haven’t talked about how to do it in practice – that’s future work. ”
Although wormholes are still theoretically sound, the fact that the researchers’ model could one day be tested is “the dream for most physicists,” Liu said.
Originally published in LiveScience.
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