Cheer up, Star Trek fans, looks like string theory may allow for universe-bridging "wormholes" to cross the cosmos.
A favorite of science fiction since the 1950's, "the dream of interstellar travel short-cuts was shattered," notes the newly-released arXiv study by Burkhard Kleihaus and Jutta Kunz of Germany's Universtat Oldenberg, when physicists later concluded that wormholes connecting far apart distances in space would likely collapse before even something traveling the speed of light could pass through them. (In the late 80's physicists such as Caltech's Kip Thorne, revived the idea by suggesting that wormholes built of exotic forms of matter might be stable)
No need to go to such lengths, suggests the new study. Reanalyzing the problem using string theory techniques used in the past to analyze black holes reveals a range of wormhole diameter-to-energy ratios that appear stable. "Since the radius of the throat is bounded from below only, the wormholes can be arbitrarily large," concludes the paper.
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