![]() ![]() As the wormhole expands and contracts, anything trapped inside is annihilated. A wormhole can be illustrated as two funnels joined at the narrow ends, with black holes situated at the wide mouths.īut unlike the wormholes in science fiction movies, they cannot transmit information or teleport matter because any message or object that goes in never reaches the other end. ![]() Scientists have theoretically demonstrated that this shortcut can be generated by creating two entangled black holes. A new door to understanding the universe has been opened.Ī wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, represents a shortcut through space and time, a type of shortened tunnel between two galaxies that are actually light years apart. Maria Spiropulo, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and one of the authors of the Nature article, says that this experiment demonstrates “that the properties of a quantum system correlate with those of a gravitational system.” This finding is a significant leap forward for the study of black holes and laboratory research on the hypothesis of quantum gravity using computers that can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics. Yet an article in Nature reports that an initial rapprochement was recently achieved with the first quantum simulation of a wormhole using the Google Sycamore processor. The two theories are incompatible, so finding a point of reconciliation is fundamental to understanding physical reality. One is focused on matter at subatomic scales, and the other examines the macroscopic world. ![]() Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity are like Cain and Abel – two mismatched siblings with the same nature. I never thought that it would be possible to see a real black hole.”īut last April, an image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope showed, for the first time, the shadow of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87.Illustration of the Cygnus X-1 black hole. Until very recently, these visualisations were limited to our imagination and computer programs. Jeremy Schnittman, a researcher at Goddard who generated the images using custom software, said the simulations “really help us visualise what Einstein meant when he said that gravity warps the fabric of space and time. Inside the photon ring is the black hole’s shadow, an area roughly twice the size of the event horizon - its point of no return.” “Because the black hole modelled in this visualisation is spherical, the photon ring looks nearly circular and identical from any viewing angle. “This so-called ‘photon ring’ is composed of multiple rings, which grow progressively fainter and thinner, from light that has circled the black hole two, three, or even more times before escaping to reach our eyes. “Closest to the black hole, the gravitational light-bending becomes so excessive that we can see the underside of the disk as a bright ring of light seemingly outlining the black hole,” Goddard said in a description of the new animation. Image: Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman Bright knots form under the influence of magnetic fields that permeate the accretion disc and dissipate in the shears and stresses produced by differences in orbital velocity, producing light and dark lanes. Light bending is most extreme close to the black hole where gas is orbiting at close to the speed of light. The asymmetry vanishes when the disc is viewed face on because none of the material is moving along the viewer’s line of sight. Gas on the right side that’s moving away from the viewer is slightly dimmer. Seen from an edge-on perspective, the accretion disc has a distinctly asymmetric appearance, with gas on the left side moving toward the viewer at such high speeds that radiation is given a relativistic boost in brightness. But as gas and dust are sucked inward, spiralling into an accretion disk around the unseen hole, atoms and molecules are accelerated to enormous velocities, generating extreme temperatures and high-energy radiation that is, in fact, visible.Ī new visualisation from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center illustrates how a black hole’s concentrated gravity warps the space surrounding it much like a carnival mirror distorts reflections. Black holes are, by definition, invisible, the collapsed remnants of once massive stars with such enormous gravity that not even light can escape. ![]()
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