Information and Scientific News Service (SINC) | Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) | 2018 Jun 12
The scientific collaborations LIGO and Virgo have detected gravitational waves from the fusion of two black holes, inaugurating a new era in the study of the cosmos. But what if those ripples of space-time had not produced by black holes, but by other exotic objects? A team of European physicists offer an alternative: wormholes, which can be traversed to appear in another universe.
Scientists have deduced the existence of black holes from a multitude of experiments, theoretical models and indirect observations, such as the recent detection, by the LIGO and Virgo observatories, of gravitational waves, which are supposed to originate from the collision of two of these dark gravitational monsters.
But there is a problem with black holes: they present an edge, called an event horizon, from which matter, radiation or anything that enters can no longer escape. This is in conflict with quantum mechanics, whose postulates ensure that information is always preserved, not lost.
One of the theoretical ways to deal with this conflict is to explore the possibility that the alleged black holes we ‘observe’ in nature are no such thing, but rather some kind of exotic compact objects (ECOs), such as wormholes, with one particularity: they do not have an event horizon, which leaves its mark on the gravitational waves recorded by LIGO and Virgo. ...
This possibility has been explored theoretically by several groups and tentative experimental analyses using the original LIGO date have been already performed, the verdict been (so far) inconclusive. ...
Echoes of Kerr-like Wormholes - Pablo Bueno et al
- Physical Review D 97(02):4040 (15 Jan 2018) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.97.024040
arXiv.org > gr-qc > arXiv:1711.00391 > 01 Nov 2017 (v1), 31 Jan 2018 (v3)