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If wormholes exist, they could magnify the light of distant objects up to 100,000 times — and that may be the key to finding them, according to research published Jan. 19 in the journal Physical Review D (opens in a new tab).
The Wormhole they are theoretical funnel-shaped portals through which matter (or perhaps spacecraft) could travel long distances. To imagine a wormhole, suppose the entire universe was a sheet of paper. If your starting point was a dot at the top of the sheet and your destination was a dot at the bottom of the sheet, the wormhole would appear if you folded that sheet of paper so that the two dots met. You could cross the entire sheet at once, rather than traveling the entire length of the sheet.
Wormholes have never been discovered, but physicists have spent years theorizing what these exotic objects look like and how they behave. In their new paper, the researchers built a model to simulate an electrically charged spherical wormhole and its effects on the universe around it. The researchers wanted to know if wormholes could be discovered by their observed effects on their environment.
The researchers’ model shows that wormholes, if they existed, could be massive enough to trigger one aspect of Einstein. the theory of relativity: that very massive objects bend the fabric of space-time so much that they bend light. This bent light magnifies whatever lies behind the massive object, as seen from our perspective on Earth. This phenomenon is called “microlensing” and it enables scientists to use massive objects, such as galaxies and black holes, to see extremely distant objects, for example stars and galaxies from the early universe.
In the paper, the researchers argue that wormholes, like black holes, would be massive enough to magnify distant objects behind them.
“The magnification through the distortion at a wormhole can be very large, which could be tested one day,” lead study author Lei-Hua Liu (opens in a new tab)physicist at Jishou University in Hunan, China, told Live Science in an email.
Liu also noted that wormholes would magnify objects differently than black holes, meaning scientists could distinguish the two. For example, microlensing through a black hole is known to produce four mirror images of the object behind it. Microlensing through a wormhole, on the other hand, would create three images: two narrow ones, and one very bright one, the authors’ simulations showed.
However, because other objects — such as galaxies, black holes and stars — also cause a microlensing effect, it would be difficult to find a wormhole without any clear clues about where to start looking, Andreas Karch (opens in a new tab)a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
It would be like “trying to get the soft voice of a single person in the middle of a rock concert,” said Karch. He also noted that while the authors of the paper offered an interesting theoretical way to identify wormholes, “how to do this in practice is not worth talking about yet – that’s future work.”
Although wormholes are still firmly theoretical, the fact that the researchers’ model could one day be tested is “the dream of most physicists,” Liu said.
