Can We Detect Wormholes?

They’re a staple of science fiction, but could they be real? New research suggests wormholes could be somewhere around us, and we could uncover them

- Ian Evenden

We’ve all seen wormholes in sciencefiction: openings in the very fabric of space through which spaceships can pass, opening up a method of faster-than-light travel in a universe that otherwise wouldn’t allow it. These shortcuts in space-time can be natural or human-made, and their exits can send you into other realms of normal space-time or into hyperspace, a set of higher dimensions laying closely alongside our own, but through which we can travel more quickly than in normal space. Their profusion in fiction might suggest they’re common.

In the set of dimensions we call reality, however, it’s not so easy. Wormholes have not been observed, and remain speculative. They’re consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which allows space-time to be distorted by gravity. Black holes are one such special solution to the equations, and wormholes are another. As we’ve only just got our first good look at a black hole, it’s entirely possible that wormholes could be out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered.

“Wormholes are allowed in theory, and they have been intensely studied theoretically,” says Dr Andreea Font of the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University. “They’re mostly regarded as theoretical curiosities, and we don’t actually have any tangible evidence of their existence.”