If wormholes exist, they could magnify the light of distant objects by up to 100,000 times — and that could be the key to finding them, according to research published Jan. 19 in the journal Physical Review D.
Wormholes are theoretical funnel-shaped portals through which matter (or perhaps spacecraft) could travel great distances. To imagine a wormhole, suppose all of the universe were a sheet of paper. If your starting point were a dot at the top of the sheet and your destination were a dot on the bottom of the sheet, the wormhole would appear if you folded that sheet of paper so the two dots met. You could traverse the entire sheet in an instant, rather than traveling the entire length of the sheet.
Wormholes have never been proven to exist, but physicists have nonetheless spent decades theorizing what these exotic objects might look and how they might behave. In their new paper, the researchers built a model to simulate an electrically charged, spherical wormhole and its effects on the universe around it. The researchers wanted to find out whether wormholes could be detectable by their observed effects on their surroundings.
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