"WORMHOLES"

From @StarTrek to travelling across the galaxy in a blink of an eye to the movie interstellar; there's this one intriguing & super interesting thing in science that connects Astrophysics and the world of SciFi

we're going 'through' a long journey Stay with me

Let's get started! once again we're gonna start out with Einstein's astounding General theory of relativity; part of the reason is that, his work actually describes the behaviour of the large scale structure of the universe very perfectly & with stunning accuracy!

Now, imagine 'SPACE' itself being a nice flat & huge rubber sheet or like trampoline, it will be flat in the absence of any kind of matter or energy! Put a heavy mass in that flat environment & the fabric of space would curve/bend just like in this gif;

this is just like putting a large ball in the middle of a trampoline, that ball would curve the fabric of trampoline and if you rolled marbles around that curved environment; you'll notice that these little balls are actually orbiting that large ball in the fabric of trampoline!

AND THIS CURVING AND WARPING OF THE FABRIC OF SPACE (spacetime to be precise) IS WHAT WE PERCEIVE AS 'GRAVITY'

Look how the moon is orbiting the earth in that curved environment, yes you got it! This is Einstein's general relativity;

Though, the description here is in 2D

In 1915, when he published his work. An Astronomer by the name of Karl Schwarzchild, solved the equations of this theory AND OH MY GOSH, he was stunned to see the result, he noticed that if you crush something as massive as a star to a very very tiny volume....

You'll eventually end up creating a BLACK HOLE, now I've described these monsters in my pinned tweet;

BUT WAITTT!

before black holes were ever taken seriously, Karl Schwarzschild's solutions to Einstein's equations revealed the possibility of the WORMHOLE!

Wormholes have been a part of science fiction writers so that they could send their fictional characters anywhere in the cosmos; but it turns out that this isn't just science fiction, THEY COULD REALLY EXIST! We're not sure yet;

In theoretical physics, we call Wormholes as 'Einstein-Rosen bridges' they together came up with a paper about this in 1935, A Wormhole is basically a tunnel connecting 2 different points in spacetime, the fabric of the universe!

These tunnels connect two points across the universe, no matter how far they are, if space can be warped and curved according to the distribution of matter as general relativity describes; then sure; wormholes seem to be a pretty good possibility!

Which brings me to the first kind of a Wormhole!

First one describes Wormholes as almost some sort of PORTAL to an infinite PARALLEL UNIVERSE!

In technical terms it just means that Schwarzchild's solution describes 2 symmetric regions of spacetime

They are kinda unstable tho, I mean they could disconnect at any time and your trip wouldn't be safe

But there are another kind of wormholes too! These are called traversable Wormholes; you can actually travel through them! It should be sufficiently sized enough to travel

It would take you from one point in space to another point in space faster than the speed of light, or I should say earlier than light, and you'd reach anywhere in the universe in a very few amount of time

Just like this cute gif of Stephen Hawking travelling through it

Now I've been saying that Wormholes are very very unstable & if you happen to travel through them they might collapse at any moment of time & you'd almost rip apart; partly Because gravity will try to collapse them down to a vv small size, so what's the solution?

For that you need a totally different thing! You, my friends need 'EXOTIC MATTER' this is not normal matter, this isn't dark matter neither antimatter!

This spooky exotic matter has NEGETIVE MASS! that's honestly super weird, it has crazily different properties!

Normal matter like trees, people, rocks and everything else attract each other because of Gravity! This exotic matter is actually *repulsive* in nature! It will prop open wormholes and prevent them from collapsing; they would create far more pressure than anything else!

TIME TRAVEL(WORMHOLE EDITION)

If you could somehow manipulate the openings of a Wormhole and take one of the openings near a black hole or take it on a high speed journey; the time at those different openings would NOT TICK OFF AT THE SAME RATE!

So that you'll not just go from location in SPACE to another, YOU'LL GO FROM ONE MOMENT IN TIME TO ANOTHER MOMENT IN TIME! One way you go to the past and if you the other way you go to the future! That's how it works!

Stephen Hawking once proposed a hypothesis called 'chronology protection conjecture' which basically says that time travel to the past won't be possible due to causality reasons; but that's on the Frontier of science and still needs some working so yea we're good w that.

Anyways, travelling through a somehow with or without exotic matter can be really Dangerous due to other reasons like tons of radiation, slamming particles and sudden collapse. After all, it's not a good vacation spot & im not seeing any volunteers for that

For now, they are in our hearts and on paper in the form of equations of physics, who knows 300 years or maybe more years from now our ideas about wormholes would be totally different! but if they actually exist; they are waiting for us to unravel their deepest secrets!

And as always, keep looking up!