![]() ![]() So even if white holes naturally formed, they wouldn't last very long. According to the math, once even a single bit of matter falls towards them, they instantly explode. Unlike their siblings, white holes are fantastically unstable. In addition, physicists largely think white holes don't exist in our universe. The wormhole would tear itself apart like an overstretched rubber band faster than the speed of light, preventing anything from traveling down it. Anything that disturbs this delicate balance - even a single packet of light, or photon - would trigger the instant collapse of the wormhole. This instability exists because creating a wormhole requires a very precise and careful arrangement of matter. So in this sense one does not really have a wormhole, since one cannot traverse it," Samir Mathur, a physicist at The Ohio State University, told Live Science in an email. "This bridge is a kind of wormhole, but it is transient: it pinches off before any object can use it to pass from one side to the other. The other problem with Einstein-Rosen bridges is their stability. That means that if you enter the wormhole you're stuck inside for eternity. But once someone crosses an event horizon, they can't ever escape. As a person can't get in on the white hole side, they'd have to fall into a black hole to enter. For one, the entrance to the wormhole sits behind the event horizon. Unfortunately, Einstein-Rosen bridges aren't very useful for traversing the cosmos. (Image credit: AleksandrMorrisovich/Shutterstock) ![]() ![]() Here we see an artist's illustration of an event horizon. But instead of falling in and finding it impossible to escape, with a white hole a person could never reach the event horizon from the outside, because it's constantly flinging its contents out into the universe faster than the speed of light.Ĭonnecting the paired singularities of a black hole and a white hole together forms the simplest kind of wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge. A white hole still has a singularity at its center and an event horizon surrounding it. While black holes were once considered just a trick of Einstein's equations, astronomical observations eventually revealed that black holes do exist in the universe.īut that same mathematics also allows for the exact reverse of a black hole: a white hole. Once someone crosses their boundaries, known as event horizons, they can't ever escape. Those equations showed that if you crunch down enough matter into a small enough volume, then gravity overwhelms every other force and shrinks the matter down into an infinitely tiny point, known as the singularity.īlack holes are one-way trips. Scientists first discovered black holes not through observations in the universe, but through the mathematics of Einstein's theory of general relativity. If they exist, they could solve some of physics' more annoying problems, and even account for the mysterious, undefined substance, "dark matter.Some physicists predict that a wormhole could become more stable if it was formed from a spinning black hole, but our understanding of what happens in that scenario is murky at best. Right now, they exist only on paper and have never been measured. So what in the world is a "white hole"? Well, they're completely theoretical opposite versions of black holes: They emit everything, but absorb nothing. Black holes' gravity is so strong that it warps spacetime itself and send out shockwave-like ripples called "gravitational waves." And so, gravity eventually wins out, sucks everything in, and boom: you've got an infinitely dense point called a "singularity" surrounded by an event horizon, a swirling exterior we were just able to "see" in 2019 (per National Geographic). In the struggle of radiation (pushing out) versus gravity (pulling in), particularly dense stars fuse not only hydrogen and helium, like our sun, but other elements: carbon and neon to oxygen and silicon, and finally iron. Only the densest of stars will become black holes.
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