Few celestial phenomena are as beloved as the wormhole. First theoretically described by Albert Einstein (yeah, him again) in the mid-1930s, a wormhole has never actually been observed by scientists. But that hasn’t stopped sci-fi creators from dreaming up movies, books, and even entire television franchises around the space-time warping concept. Of course, who can blame them—a story about a tunnel through space basically writes itself.
Based on our understanding of physics, there are a couple different kinds of wormholes, including Schwarzchild wormholes, Einstein-Rosen wormholes, and (most importantly for the sci-fi minded among us) traversable wormholes—bridges that matter could technically travel through. While this last type of wormhole relies on exotic matter, negative energy, or very specific conditions, that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying to figure out how exactly such a wormhole would work.
In a new study published in May in the journal Physical Review D, Luciano Combi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute based in Ontario, Canada, investigated what would happen if one side of a wormhole began accreting (read: gobbling up) matter. The results of such a (purely theoretical) phenomena would likely create a plasma tornado trapped in the “throat” of the wormhole, and eventually lead to the firing of that plasma out of the other wormhole “mouth” at a blazing 125 million miles an hour.
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