Wormholes Could be Portals to Other Universes—Here’s What One Might Look Like

Representative image of a black hole. iStock

Wormholes are theoretical objects that could serve as portals between two points in space and time. Some believe they could even act as passageways to other universes. But if one did exist, what would it look like?

Roman Konoplya, a theoretical physicist with the Peoples Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University), has attempted to answer this question in a study published in the journal Physics Letters B.

“The wormhole shape can be imagined if you put together two kitchen funnels,” he told Newsweek. “The junction of both funnels occurs at the narrowest part of such a system. It corresponds to what we call ‘throat’ of a wormhole. In a stricter way, if one takes rope and winds it round such a funnel at some distance from the throat, he can measure the length of the rope, then he can repeat measurements at some other distance from the throat and so on and so on.

“Knowledge of such measurable lengths at any distance from the throat gives us the full shape of the wormhole. Far from the throat the funnel is flat and the effect of gravitational attraction of the wormhole is tiny. Therefore it is important to know the shape of a wormhole near the throat, where interaction of the wormhole with its astrophysical environment should occur.”

Scientists can only make observations of hypothetical wormholes by looking at their indirect properties. This includes redshift, where there is a shift towards longer wavelengths of the spectral lines by an object moving away from Earth. Konoplya used quantum mechanical and geometrical assumptions to show how the shape of a wormhole could be calculated based on the redshift value.

Representative image of a wormhole. iStock

He used a mathematical model of a wormhole to describe how the shape and symmetry can be determined based on its wave range. From this he developed an equation to calculate its geometrical shape. Explaining how we might one day use this work find wormholes, he said: “In order to discard—or prove, who knows—the existence of wormholes it is important to constrain allowed geometries of wormholes by comparing theory with experiment.”

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