A new theory has attempted to explain whether wormholes, also known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge – a theoretical connection of two separate points in space-time – can be used as a viable means of space travel in the future.
These wormholes were predicted by Albert Einstein’s revolutionary theory of general relativity and by the American-Israeli physicist Nathan Rosen, who coined the term “Einstein-Rosen bridge”, which describes spacetime as a kind of elastic tissue. that bends and deforms by gravity.
Now, a new study, published in the pre-printed arXiv database in October and to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Modern Physics D., assures that these wormholes, or portals between black holes, could be stable after all, contradicting previous predictions that these hypothetical shortcuts are incredibly unstable and would instantly collapse.
Black holes and the Schwarzschild metric
Although the rules of general relativity are fixed, the theory itself offers a great deal of freedom to describe these coordinates mathematically. Physicists call these different descriptions “metrics”.
Today, black holes are often described using the so-called Schwarzschild metric – named after the German physicist and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild – which is where black holes were first discovered.
Schwarzschild described a radius around a black hole, the so-called event horizon, beyond which all concepts of time and space vanish. On the event horizon, the black hole’s gravity is too powerful for any other force in the universe to overcome, not even light.
Thus, the Schwarzschild metric, which contains some “strange math,” behaves “badly” at a certain distance from the black hole and breaks completely, and can no longer distinguish between different points in space and the weather.
The Eddington-Finkelstein metric
To avoid this problem, the physicist Pascal Koiran, from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), has proposed something different in his study and has modeled wormholes using the so-called Eddington-Finkelstein metric.
The study found that, using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, it was possible to document the passage of a particle through the event horizon, the crossing point towards the wormhole, traversing it and reaching the other side in a finite time.
Other variables would make Einstein-Rosen bridges unstable
This means that the path of a particle going through a wormhole could be more easily traced using this metric. In other words, the Eddington-Finkelstein metric did not behave “badly” at any point in that trajectory, according to the scientific medium, which qualified by ensuring that, despite the results, the Einstein-Rosen bridges are not necessarily stable. due to many more variables not contemplated in general relativity.
However, there are those who already dream of the hypothetical scenario where one day humans can travel through a wormhole and reach distant points in space-time that are out of our reach. And it was not for less: mathematically there are stable paths through the tunnels of wormholes perfectly allowed, at least, by general relativity.