Are black holes wormholes? | | Live Science
In science fiction, space explorers routinely travel through a wormhole in spacetime connected by two black holes.
But are black holes really portals to wormholes? And do these wormholes look like those in Star Trek?
The math of the universe doesn’t rule it out entirely, but the simple answer is probably not.
By itself, the only thing in the center Black Hole is a singularity — a point of infinite density.
In theory, however, a black hole could pair with a mirror twin called a white hole to form a wormhole. Yet these theoretical wormholes are nothing like the wormholes depicted in science fiction. Conventional wormholes are predicted to be highly unstable.
Some physicists predict that wormholes might be more stable if they formed from a spinning black hole, but our understanding of what would happen in that scenario is at best Ambiguous.
Einstein Rosen Bridge
Scientists, not observations in space, einsteinthe theory of general relativityThese equations state that if a sufficient amount of material is crushed into a small enough volume, gravity Overwhelms all other forces and reduces matter to infinitely small points known as singularities.
A black hole is one-way. Once the boundary called the event horizon is crossed, the person can never escape.Black holes were once just Einstein’s equation trickastronomical observations finally revealed the existence of black holes in the universe.
But the same mathematics also makes possible the exact opposite of a black hole: a white hole. At the center of White Hole is still a singularity, surrounded by an event horizon. But instead of falling into a white hole and becoming inescapable, the Event Horizon cannot be reached from the outside. This is because white holes are constantly ejecting their contents into space faster than the speed of light.
Connecting a pair of singularities of a black hole and a white hole forms the simplest kind of wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
not very useful
Unfortunately, the Einstein-Rosen bridge isn’t very useful for traversing space. One is that the entrance to the wormhole is behind the event horizon. People cannot enter the white hole side, so they have to fall into the black hole. But once you cross the event horizon, you can never escape. This means that once you enter the wormhole, you will be trapped forever.
Another problem with the Einstein-Rosen bridge is its stability. “This bridge is a kind of wormhole, but it’s temporary. Before an object can use it to pass from one side to the other, it will pinch off. So this In a sense, there really isn’t a wormhole because you can’t go through it, Sameer Mathur, a physicist at Ohio State University, told Live Science via email.
This instability exists because creating a wormhole requires very precise and careful placement of matter. Anything that disturbs this delicate balance, even his one packet of light or photons, causes the wormhole’s immediate collapse. Wormholes tear faster than the speed of light like an overstretched rubber band, preventing anything from moving through it.
Moreover, physicists believe that white holes do not exist in our universe. Unlike its siblings, White Hole is surprisingly unstable. According to mathematics, if even a drop of matter falls towards them, they instantly explode. Therefore, even if a white hole were to form naturally, it would not last very long.
The combination of the uncertainty in the existence of white holes, the instability of Einstein-Rosen bridges, and their relative unusability means that if wormholes exist, they are probably not Einstein-Rosen bridges.
rotating singularity
There may be ways to construct wormholes from black holes of a more complex kind: taking into account their rotation. All black holes rotate, but New Zealand mathematician Roy His Kerr has solved the mathematics of rotating black holes for the first time.
At the center of a spinning black hole, extreme centrifugal forces spread point-like singularities into rings. This “ring singularity” could be the entrance to the wormhole, but it would also pose a stability problem.
“The Carrhal singularity is surrounded by an ‘inner horizon’, which is surrounded by an ‘outer horizon.’ We believe that it completely changes the region inside the ring and also modifies the singularity. It is to encounter competing effects. The enormous gravity of the singularity itself and the extreme centrifugal force of the spins at the center of the black hole acting in opposite directions. .
As you can imagine, this is not a very pleasant situation and things can quickly get messy. The situation is so unstable that it even prevents the formation of singularities altogether. In this case, many physicists believe that the notion of a ‘ring singularity’ from a rotating black hole could be replaced by a more concrete idea as our understanding of these objects improves.
Originally published in Live Science.