Wormholes that are surrounded by matter, like the ring that gathers around a black hole, could create strange rotating clouds of hot plasma. Anything that falls in one end could shoot out the other at 200 million kilometres per hour, or even faster if the wormhole is enormous.
A wormhole is a tunnel between two locations in space-time. The simplest versions of these hypothetical objects have black holes as 鈥渕ouths鈥� on either end of the throat connecting them 鈥� nothing can escape once it has passed the edge of a black hole, known as its event horizon, so nothing should be able to travel through such a wormhole. But with the help of exotic types of theoretical matter, researchers have built models of traversable wormholes. And now we know what they might look like.
at the Perimeter Institute in Canada and his colleagues modelled what would happen if one mouth of a wormhole was accreting matter, similar to an active black hole. They found that the matter falling in would get trapped in the throat and form a blazing hot, rotating cloud 鈥� a sort of glowing tornado.
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While the wormhole model they used is technically traversable, the hot plasma storm inside the throat would prevent that. 鈥淭he temperatures are crazy high, so if you tried to actually cross through it you would be burned to a crisp,鈥� says Combi. For a large enough wormhole, the temperatures might even get high enough to initiate nuclear fusion, he says.
However, these same extraordinary temperatures would also make the wormhole possible to see. From a distance, the hot cloud would appear to glow like a star, regardless of which mouth of the wormhole you are looking at. If the wormhole mouths were true black holes, the light would not be able to escape past their event horizons, but in a traversable wormhole this would simply make each mouth appear like a shining orb of hot plasma.
鈥淚n principle, you could say that even though you don鈥檛 have an event horizon, the gravitational pull will slow down the light and you won鈥檛 see anything,鈥� says Combi. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 so, so bright that you can actually overcome that.鈥�
The mouth into which matter is falling would look very similar to a black hole with an accretion disc, a ring of hot matter surrounding it 鈥� but instead of a shadow in the centre of the disc, there would be a bright spot from the cloud in the wormhole鈥檚 throat. The other mouth would look like a sphere full of glowing fog, but it could be spewing out matter at around 20 per cent the speed of light, a striking signature of an exotic object.
There is just one problem 鈥� the researchers did not take into account how the plasma might affect the wormhole as it falls in, perturbing it and creating instabilities. 鈥淭he wormhole will become unstable with time,鈥� says Petya Nedkova at Sofia University 鈥淪t. Kliment Ohridski鈥� in Bulgaria. 鈥淭he wormhole will disintegrate and transform into another type of space-time鈥� which may make their experimental detection complicated.鈥�
Now that we have a better understanding of what an accreting wormhole might look like, if we do ever spot one we have a chance of knowing what it is. 鈥淏ut there are several kinds of wormholes and, if wormholes exist, they are not necessarily traversable wormholes,鈥� says at Fudan University in China. More simulations like this are needed to examine what other types of wormholes would look like, so that if they are out there, we might be able to find them.
arXiv
