Researchers have found a new method to determine if a wormhole exists in a certain region of space—an advance that may help spot the speculative entity which is thought to form a warped passage between two separate cosmic regions.
The new method focuses on spotting a hypothetical wormhole around what's thought to be a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy called Sagittarius A*, the researchers, including those from the University at Buffalo in the US, said.
The study, published in the journal Physical Review D, describes a technique that astronomers could use to hunt for a wormhole by looking for perturbations in the path of S2—a star that astronomers have observed orbiting Sagittarius A*.
While there is no evidence of a wormhole existing around Sagittarius A*, the researchers said that it is a good place to look for a wormhole since these bridges are expected to require extreme gravitational conditions—such as those present at supermassive black holes.
According to the researchers, if a wormhole existed at Sagittarius A*, the stars around it would be influenced by the gravity of stars at the other end of the mysterious bridge.
"If you have two stars, one on each side of the wormhole, the star on our side should feel the gravitational influence of the star that's on the other side. The gravitational flux will go through the wormhole," said co-author of the study Dejan Stojkovic from the University at Buffalo.
Stojkovic added that if wormholes were ever discovered, they could be different from the kind envisioned in popular works of science fiction.
"Even if a wormhole is traversable, people and spaceships most likely aren't going to be passing through," Stojkovic said.
According to the researchers, we would need a source of negative energy to keep the wormhole open, and "we don't know how to do that," Stojkovik said.
While the study outlines the method to say whether a wormhole is the most likely explanation for perturbations in the path of S2, it noted that alternatively, one can expect the same effect from black hole pairs revolving around each other, or in black holestar binary systems.