A Bulgarian research team has announced a method they say could be used to detect wormholes, theoretical structures that—if proven to exist—might be capable of connecting vastly distant points in spacetime.
Wormholes have long captured the imaginations of physicists. Part of that fascination has to do with the fact that wormholes, much like the concept of time travel, are consistent with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Despite their theoretical plausibility, scientists have yet to find correlates for these concepts in practical reality.
Detecting wormholes is problematic, mainly because these mind-bending structures would hypothetically be almost indistinguishable from black holes, regions of space that are the likely products of a star that has exhausted its fuel and collapsed into itself, detectable by scientists mainly by the intense gravity they exert on nearby objects in space.
Add to their similarity to black holes the fact that we still aren’t certain if wormholes actually exist, and the process of reliably detecting them becomes even more challenging.
That may soon change, however, based on the findings of a team with the University of Sofia in Bulgaria, who say they have developed a novel new method that could help scientists differentiate between black holes and their hypothetical cousins.
In a new paper published in Physical Review D, the team, consisting of Valentin Deliyski, Galin Gyulchev, Petya Nedkova, and Stoytcho Yazadjiev, studied the linear polarization produced by accretion disks, the rotating formations of matter visible around black holes and other astronomical objects that consist mostly of gases, plasma, or stellar dust.
According to the team’s paper, they searched for specific signatures in the polarization properties of these formations, which they hoped might help them determine the difference between black holes and any suspected candidates for wormholes.
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