- Wormholes (as far as we know) only exist in the world of theoretical astrophysics and myriad sci-fi stories. But scientists are trying to piece together what such a celestial phenomenon might look like and how it could behave.
- Previous studies have determined that wormholes would appear remarkably similar to black holes, but new research puts forward that traversable wormholes—ones that actively gobble up matter—would have slight differences.
- This kind of wormhole would likely form extremely hot plasma tornadoes in its throat—which could be visible—and would also fire matter out from its other “mouth” at a staggering 125 million miles per hour, or one-fifth the speed of light.
Few celestial phenomena are as beloved as the wormhole. First theoretically described by Albert Einstein (yeah, him again) in the mid-1930s, a wormhole has never actually been observed by scientists. But that hasn’t stopped sci-fi creators from dreaming up movies, books, and even entire television franchises around the space-time warping concept. Of course, who can blame them—a story about a tunnel through space basically writes itself.
Based on our understanding of physics, there are a couple different kinds of wormholes, including Schwarzchild wormholes, Einstein-Rosen wormholes, and (most importantly for the sci-fi minded among us) traversable wormholes—bridges that matter could technically travel through. While this last type of wormhole relies on exotic matter, negative energy, or very specific conditions, that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying to figure out how exactly such a wormhole would work.
In a new study published in May in the journal Physical Review D, Luciano Combi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute based in Ontario, Canada, investigated what would happen if one side of a wormhole began accreting (read: gobbling up) matter. The results of such a (purely theoretical) phenomena would likely create a plasma tornado trapped in the “throat” of the wormhole, and eventually lead to the firing of that plasma out of the other wormhole “mouth” at a blazing 125 million miles an hour.
“We present the first dynamical model of plasma accretion onto traversable wormholes by performing general relativistic magnetohydrodynamical (GRMHD) simulations of the flow on both sides of the wormhole,” the paper reads. “The wormhole cloud acts as an engine in which gas coming from one side accumulates at the center, dissipates energy, and powers a mildly relativistic thermal wind toward the other side.”
This is bad news for anyone that’d want to travel through the wormhole, considering the heat alone from the plasma tornado could likely cause nuclear fusion. But there is a bright side—quite literally.
“In principle, you could say that even though you don’t have an event horizon, the gravitational pull will slow down the light and you won’t see anything,” Combi told New Scientist. “But it’s so, so bright that you can actually overcome that.”
This particular side effect means that wormholes could theoretically be visible. The ring surrounding the wormhole would look similar to the accretion disk around black holes, but with a bright spot in its center. The other “mouth” of the wormhole would look a bit different, as it’d be busy spewing plasma at one-fifth the speed of light.
However, this “visibility” might be incredibly unstable. As Sofia University’s Petya Nedkova described to New Scientist, the wormhole “will disintegrate and transform into another type of space-time... which may make their experimental detection complicated.” Nedkova was part of a 2022 study that explored methods for detecting wormholes by recognizing different polarization properties between black holes and wormholes.
In other words, actually finding wormholes remains as difficult as ever. But if science were to stumble upon one, we’d at least know what we were looking at.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
