WORMHOLES that let humans travel through space and time could be possible, scientists have proposed.
Physics supports the concept of wormholes but until now most scientists agreed they would be too small and unstable for a person to travel through.
Physicists at Princeton University in the US have used quantum mechanics to find a mathematical loophole which they think shows it could be possible to create a wormhole large enough for humans and their spacecraft.
They used maths to theorise conditions that could make a wormhole possible and even imagined what one would look like.
They wrote: “From the outside they resemble intermediate mass charged black holes.
“Their big size comes from demanding that a human traveller can survive the tidal forces.
“The traveller acquires a very large boost factor, γ, as it goes through the center of the wormhole.
“We have argued this most clearly for the case that the wormhole exists in a cold and flat ambient space.
“We have not given any plausible mechanism for their formation. We have only argued that they are configurations allowed by the equations.”
In theory, wormholes could act like a magical gateway easily connecting two points in space and time with each other.
In science fiction, they’re often depicted as gateways that can let people step into another time or galaxy.
It’s a bit of a confusing concept but a wormhole is essentially a theoretical method of folding space and time so two places in space can be connected together.
Fans of the movie Interstellar will be familiar with this concept.
It shows how astronauts on a spacecraft could travel through a wormhole with only a small amount of time passing for them but, for people back on Earth, hundreds or even thousands of years could have passed.
It’s like drawing a line between two dots on a piece of paper, folding the paper over so the dots are touching and then forcing your pen through the page.
The hole created represents the wormhole.
Einstein theorised that space time can be tangled up so tightly that two points can share the same physical location.
Then all you need is a short wormhole between the two for instantaneous travel.
Wormholes may be theoretically possible to create but will remain impossible unless we create more advanced technology.
This is what Physics experts Juan Maldacena and Alexey Milekhin have been trying to prove.
They relied on something called the 5-dimensional warped geometry theory, which proposes that the Universe is in five dimensions.
A five dimensional universe would allow something called negative energy to exist and it’s this that the scientists think could make a wormhole stable and large.
The we’d just need the right tools to manipulate the negative energy.
Some astronomers think we should look for natural wormholes in space by observing how gravity is distorting light behind stars.
The full study can be read on the preprint server araXiv.
In other space news, Nasa has discovered an incredible star wars galaxy that looks just like iconic Tie Fighter.
The space agency is tracking a huge asteroid nearly twice the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza which is hurtling towards Earth at 31,400mph.
And, a mysterious radio signal beamed to Earth from a distant galaxy has been detected again by astronomers.
Source – The Sun
