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Huge cosmological mystery could be solved by wormholes, new study argues
News
By Andrey Feldman published 21 hours ago
The universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate rCo and tiny
wormholes that bore through the fabric of space-time might be to blame,
a new study proposes.
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An illustration of a red spiral tunnel in space with a bright light at
the end
An illustration of a wormhole tunnelling through space-time. Such
wormholes could explain the increasing expansion of the universe, a new
study proposes. (Image credit: Xuanyu Han via Getty Images)
Microscopic wormholes may be driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, scientists say. These tiny wormholes are constantly being born
from the vacuum of space due to subtle quantum effects.
If confirmed through experiments and observations, the wormholes could
become a valuable source of information on quantum gravity rCo a
theoretical unification of the fundamental forces of the universe, often considered to be the Holy Grail of theoretical physics.
Numerous astronomical observations show that our universe is expanding
at an ever-increasing rate. However, Einstein's general theory of
relativity states that if the universe contains only the species of
particles and radiation we know, such behavior of the fabric of space is impossible.
To reconcile the observations of universe expansion with this theory, scientists have proposed that space is filled with an enigmatic entity
that can't be detected in ground or space-based experiments.
This mysterious substance, called dark energy, interacts very weakly
with other types of matter and fields, so, there is currently no
reliable information about its structure or origin.
In a recent study published April 5 in the journal Physical Review D, researchers proposed a bold new candidate for dark energy:
subatomic-size wormholes rCo or tiny tunnels connecting disparate points
in space.
Related: Wormholes might bend light like black holes do rCo and that could
be the key to finding them
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According to the authors, these wormholes are constantly being born and destroyed in the vacuum of space due to quantum effects. This is similar
to how particles are produced near the event horizons of black holes,
leading to Hawking radiation; or how electron-positron pairs are
generated by a strong electric field rCo a phenomenon known as the
Schwinger effect.
However, the creation of these wormholes is somewhat different from
those other phenomena because their mathematical description requires
quantum effects in gravity to be accounted for rCo a task that's much more complicated and poorly understood.
These difficulties in calculating quantum gravitational phenomena
prevented the authors from accurately deriving the wormhole birth rate. However, using an approach known as Euclidean quantum gravity, they
showed that if about 10 billion wormholes are spontaneously created per
cubic centimeter per second, the energy they generate would be
sufficient to explain the currently observed rate of the universe's
expansion.
"Although our result was derived on the grounds of Euclidean quantum gravityrCa it is likely that our modification may hold for other quantum gravity theories as well," study co-author Stylianos Tsilioukas, a
doctoral student at the University of Thessaly and National Observatory
of Athens, told Live Science via email.
Moreover, the team's analysis showed that their model of dark energy is
even better observationally than the most widely accepted theory, known
as the Standard Cosmological Model, which posits that dark energy has a time-independent energy density.
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new research suggests
"According to our proposal dark energy can change as time flows,"
Tsilioukas said. "This is a major advantage because recent observations suggest that the rate of expansion of the universe is different in
recent times than it was in the early universe."
However, no matter how successful the researchers' model is at
explaining the general properties of dark energy, the validity of any
physical theory must be tested with experimental data. And for now, the
theory remains untestable.
In the future, the ever-increasing accuracy of space experiments and observations should enable astronomers to deduce the universe expansion
rate in more detail, as well as to measure other observable
manifestations of dark energy. This could enable researchers to test
whether this newly proposed model of dark energy is correct.
In the meantime, the authors plan to further improve their theoretical analysis. "We are working right now on a model which calculates the rate
of wormhole formation. " Tsilioukas said. "The research seems promising
and we hope to publish the results very soon."
Andrey Feldman
Andrey Feldman
Live Science Contributor
Andrey got his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in elementary particle physics
from Novosibirsk State University in Russia, and a Ph.D. in string
theory from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He works as a
science writer, specializing in physics, space, and technology. His
articles have been published in Elements, N+1, and AdvancedScienceNews.
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