A couple of French and German physicists have suggested that black holes could be portals leading to other universes.
In their study, physicists Thibault Damour of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, and Sergey Solodukhin of International University Bremen in Germany claim that it is not necessary that all unexplained objects in the universe are black holes. They could also be wormholes, or warps in the fabric of space-time that connect one place to another.
Damour and Solodukhin studied what such a wormhole might look like, and were surprised to discover that it would mimic a black hole so well that it would be virtually impossible to tell the difference.
They both found that matter swirls around a wormhole in the same way as it does around a black hole, since both objects distort the space around them in the same way.
One might hope to distinguish the two by something called Hawking radiation, an emission of particles and light which should only come from black holes and would have a characteristic energy spectrum, but both Damour and Solodukhin found this radiation to be so weak that it would be completely swamped by other sources, such as the background glow of microwaves left over from the big bang.
Another difference that emerged was that unlike black holes, wormholes have no event horizon. This means that things could go in a wormhole and come back out again.
Damour and Solodukhin feel that their research is not yet foolproof. They say that depending on the detailed shape of the wormhole, it could take billions of years or more for things to pop back out after falling in. With the right shape, even the oldest wormholes in our universe would not have had time to spit anything back out yet.
It seems the only way to decide the issue for sure with astronomical black holes is to make a daring plunge inside. That would be a dangerous gamble, because if it is a black hole, the incredibly strong gravitational field inside would tear apart every atom in your body. Even if it turns out to be a wormhole, the forces inside could still be deadly.
--- ANI
(Original headline: Black holes could also be portals to other universes, feel scientists )
