If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole in space, you won’t be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But you may have just enough time to send a message to the rest of us from the other side, researchers report in the Nov. 15 Physical Review D.
No one has yet seen a wormhole, but theoretically they could provide shortcuts to distant parts of the universe, or to other universes entirely, if they exist (SN: 7/27/17). Physicists have long known that one of the most commonly studied types of wormholes would be extremely unstable and would collapse if any matter entered it. It wasn’t clear, though, just how fast that might happen or what it means for something, or someone, heading into it.
Now, a new computer program shows how one type of wormhole would respond when something travels through it.
“You build a probe and you send it through” in the wormhole simulation, says Ben Kain, a physicist at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. “You’re not necessarily trying to get it to come back, because you know the wormhole is going to collapse — but could a light signal get back in time before a collapse? And we found that it is possible.”
To read more, click here.