#physicsunsolved #ep01 Episode 01: Are Wormholes Real?
Wormholes are theoretical objects that connect two points in spacetime together. Albert Einstein's field equations demonstrate they're mathematically possible under general relativity, though to date, no direct evidence of their existence has been found.
That may change due to the advent of gravitational wave astronomy. Gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime — from colliding black holes were first observed in 2015, and more signals arise every few months. Because of how gravitational waves carry specific frequencies that allow astrophysicists to understand how they originated, scientists think it's possible that we will one day detect the merger of two wormholes.
An oft-overlooked study from KU Leuven details the first described model of how a gravitational wave signal from merging wormholes would likely look: it would be similar to a BH collision with one exception — there would be faint echoes after the ringdown phase.
To date, no concrete evidence of gravitational wave echoes has been found, except for a lone analysis in 2016 from the Sharif University of Technology that has been contested by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. This will no doubt be an area of future research, due to the implications a confirmation of wormholes would have on the field of physics. Echoes could suggest other exotic objects like fuzzballs and gravistars exist, though we'll cover those in a future episode.
An important note: the detection of echoes that match the authors' wormhole model would not rule out the existence of black holes, it would just suggest that gravitationally compact objects have more variety than once thought.
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"Echoes of Kerr-like wormholes," Pablo Bueno, Pablo A. Cano, Frederik Goelen, Thomas Hertog, and Bert Vercnocke (2018):
"The Particle Problem in the General Theory of Relativity," A. Einstein and N. Rosen (1935):
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It's Bloody Science! LLC created the text and audio of this video. All other images, sounds and video clips are freely available in the public domain or Creative Commons licenses, or are licensed via Powtoon software.
Several clips from Caltech media archive, available for public use:
Caltech - Signage
Warped Space and Time Around Colliding Black Holes
Journey of a Gravitational Wave
LIGO: The First Observation of Gravitational Waves
Additional Creative Commons credits:
Lorentzian Wormhole:
Wormhole demo:
Kip Thorne and colleagues, 1972:
Quantum fluctuations:
Casimir effect:
Thumbnails are still images of videos via Pixabay (left) and "LIGO: The First Observation of Gravitational Waves," Caltech (right).
Song: Digital Secrets, Unicorn Heads — freely available for use and monetization in the YouTube Audio Library.
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