In this scenario, eventually the black hole would stop falling in and out of the wormhole and settle near its throat. "Though wormholes are very, very speculative, the fact that we might have the ability to prove or at least give credibility to their existence is pretty cool," study co-author William Gabella, a physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, told. Detecting this kind of gravitational signal might support the existence of wormholes. The length of time between each chirp and anti-chirp would shrink over time until the black hole got stuck in the throat of the wormhole. If one watched a black hole emerge from a wormhole, one would see an "anti-chirp." Specifically, the frequency of gravitational waves from the black hole would decrease as it moved farther away from the wormhole.Īs the black hole keeps journeying in and out each mouth of the wormhole, it would generate a cycle of chirps and anti-chirps. Related: Here's how we could detect a wormhole (In contrast, when two black holes collide, the result is a giant burst of gravitational waves.) If one watched a black hole spiral into a wormhole, one would see a chirp much like two black holes meeting, but the gravitational signal from the black hole would quickly fade as it radiated most of its gravitational waves on the other side of the wormhole. The sound these gravitational waves would produce is a chirp, much like when one increases the pitch rapidly on a slide whistle, since any increase in frequency corresponds to an increase in pitch. In turn, the frequency of the gravitational waves rises. When two black holes spiral closer to one another, their orbital speeds increase, much like spinning figure skaters who draw their arms closer to their bodies. The models suggested that gravitational signals unlike any seen up to now would occur when the black hole journeyed into and out of the wormhole. In computer models, the researchers analyzed the interactions between a black hole five times the mass of the sun and a stable traversable wormhole 200 times the mass of the sun with a throat 60 times wider than the black hole. The researchers also explored what might happen when the black hole enters one mouth of the wormhole, exits out the wormhole's other mouth into another point in space-time, and then - assuming the black hole and wormhole are gravitationally bound to one another - falls back into the wormhole and emerges out the other side. The main difference is that no object can theoretically get back out after entering a black hole's event horizon - the threshold where the speed needed to escape the black hole's gravitational pull exceeds the speed of light - whereas any object entering a wormhole could theoretically reverse course.Īssuming wormholes might exist, scientists investigated the gravitational signals generated when a black hole orbits a wormhole for a new paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. Both types of objects are extraordinarily dense and have powerful gravitational pulls for objects their size. In many ways, a wormhole resembles a black hole. Related: Weirdly-shaped wormholes might work better than spherical ones No one knows if such exotic matter actually exists. The only way to keep them open and traversable is with an exotic form of matter with so-called "negative mass." Such exotic matter has bizarre properties, including flying away from a standard gravitational field instead of falling toward it like normal matter. In principle, all wormholes are unstable, closing the instant they open. Einstein's theory of general relativity allows for the possibility of wormholes, although whether they really exist is another matter. Wormholes are tunnels in spacetime that, in theory, can allow travel anywhere in space and time, or even into another universe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |