Wormholes ormholes are so-called gateways that provide a shortcut through the fabric of space-time. They can be thought of as W tunnels with ends capped by an everhungry black and a white hole, the black hole’s time-reversed cousin that prefers to spit things out if anything comes too close to its event horizon.
It’s true that a wormhole never looks out of place in science fiction – for example, lurking in the universe of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and employed by captain Benjamin Sisko and his crew of the Defiant. They use the hole to travel from the Alpha to the Gamma quadrant on the other side of the galaxy at unprecedented speed – certainly a thrilling prospect.
However, we still don’t know for sure whether traversable wormholes like the ones in Star Trek really exist. Even finding the slightest hint of these natural portals almost seems like a pipe dream. With this in mind, it would seem odd that massive organisations are still looking, such as Project RadioAstron, the Soviet Union’s first radio astronomy research facility.
“The search for wormholes seems like a worthy undertaking,” muses assistant professor of astrophysics Robert Owen of Oberlin College. His thoughts are echoed by Igor Novikov, a Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist who made an important contribution to the theory of time travel during the mid-1980s. The Novikov Self-consistency Principle states that it’s impossible to make paradoxes of time. “There’s a hypothesis that primordial wormholes exist and can connect some regions in our universe in the model of the multiverse,” Novikov, who is based at the Russian Space Research Institute in Moscow, explains. “In this case, the search for astrophysical wormholes is a unique possibility to study the other universes.”
These elusive tunnels through space wouldn’t just be a major discovery in and of themselves, but could even open up
