This article theorizes that some of the black holes that have been discovered
may actually be worm holes, or portals to other universes.
Could Black Holes Be Portals to Other
Universes?
The objects scientists think are black holes could instead be wormholes leading to other universes, a new study says. If so, it would help
resolve a quantum conundrum known as the black hole information paradox, but critics say it would also raise new problems, such as how the wormholes
would form in the first place.
To an observer, a worm hole would look just like a black hole.
Wormholes are warps in the fabric of space-time that connect one place to another. If you imagine the universe as a two-dimensional sheet, you
can picture a wormhole as a "throat" connecting our sheet to another one. In this scenario, the other sheet could be a universe of its own, with its
own stars, galaxies and planets.
Damour and Solodukhin studied what such
a wormhole might look like, and were surprised to discover that it would mimic a black hole so well that it
would be virtually impossible to tell the difference.
Matter would swirl around a wormhole in the same way as for a black hole, since both objects distort the space around them in the same way.
One way that scientists
could identify a black hole from a worm hole is by detecting Hawking radiation that is emitted from black holes, but
unfortunately, it is so weak we cannot detect it.
One might hope to distinguish the two by something called Hawking radiation, an emission of particles and light which should only come from
black holes and would have a characteristic energy spectrum.
But this radiation is so weak that it would be completely swamped by other
sources, such as the background glow of microwaves left over from the big bang,
making it unobservable in practice.
There still might be an experiment using particle accelerator that might just answer the question now, black holes or worm holes?
And there might be a way to test the conjecture. Some physicists say that
future particle accelerator experiments could produce microscopic
black holes (see Atom smasher may give birth to 'Black Saturns').
Such tiny black holes would emit measurable amounts of Hawking radiation, proving that they are black holes rather than wormholes. But if
Solodukhin is right, and microscopic wormholes are formed instead, no such radiation would be expected. "In that case, you would actually see if it
is a black hole or a wormhole," he says.
An added benefit of wormholes is that they could resolve the so-called black hole information paradox. The only way anything can exit a black
hole is in the form of Hawking radiation, but it is not clear how the radiation carries information about the original object that was swallowed. This
scrambling effect conflicts with quantum mechanics, which forbids such erasing of information (see Black holes: The ultimate quantum computers?).
"Theoretically, wormholes are much better than black holes because all these problems with information loss don't exist in this case,"
Solodukhin says. Since wormholes have no event horizons, things are free to leave without first being converted into Hawking radiation, so there is no
problem with lost information.
So now the question is are all the identified black holes actually worm holes, or maybe just some of them?
And how would a worm hole form, what would cause an area in space to become a worm hole?
[edit on 6/8/07 by Keyhole]
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