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xParaAdminx- 07-16-2007
White Holes & Worm Holes
What the world is a White Hole? Research Taken from http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=108 White holes are not something that it is possible to understand using physical intuition. White holes pop up in general relativity and that theory as a whole is not easy to understand physically. The only way most people can understand general relativity is through mathematics. The short answer is that a white hole is something which probably cannot exist in the real universe. A white hole will turn up in your mathematics if you explore the space-time around a black hole without including the star which made the black hole (ie. there is absolutely no matter in the solution). Once you add any matter to the space-time, the part which included a white hole disappears. Which basically a white hole is the opposite of a black hole. Wiki definition White Hole is a postulated celestial body that is the time reversal of a black hole. Whilst a black hole acts as a point mass whose gravitational pull attracts and eventually absorbs any matter that crosses the event horizon, a white hole acts as a point mass that repels or perhaps even ejects matter as in an exit from a black hole. Origin of a white hole. White holes appear as part of the vacuum solution to the Einstein field equations describing a Schwarzschild wormhole. One end of this type of wormhole is a black hole, drawing in matter, and the other is a white hole, emitting matter. While this gives the impression that black holes in this universe may connect to white holes elsewhere, this turns out not to be the case for two reasons. First, Schwarzschild wormholes are unstable, disconnecting as soon as they form. Second, Schwarzschild wormholes are only a solution to the Einstein field equations in vacuum (when no matter interacts with the hole). Real black holes are formed by the collapse of stars. When the infalling stellar matter is added to a diagram of a black hole's history, it removes the part of the diagram corresponding to the white hole <1>. The existence of white holes that are not part of a wormhole is doubtful, as they appear to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Quasars and active galactic nuclei are observed to spew out jets of matter. This is now believed to be the result of polar jets formed when matter falls into super massive black holes at the centers of these objects. Prior to this model, white holes emitting matter were one possible explanation proposed. Worm Holes Definition taken from Worm Hole Short answer: The basic notion of an intra-universe wormhole is that it is a compact region of spacetime whose boundary is topologically trivial but whose interior is not simply connected. Formalizing this idea leads to definitions such as the following, taken from Matt Visser's Lorentzian Wormholes: If a Lorentzian spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R x Σ, where Σ is a three-manifold of nontrivial topology, whose boundary has topology of the form dΣ ~ S², and if, furthermore, the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a quasipermanent intra-universe wormhole. Characterizing inter-universe wormholes is more difficult. For example, one can imagine a 'baby' universe connected to its 'parent' by a narrow 'umbilicus'. One might like to regard the umbilicus as the throat of a wormhole, but the spacetime is simply connected. Defined: In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that is essentially a 'shortcut' through space and time. A wormhole has at least two mouths which are connected to a single throat. If the wormhole is traversable, matter can 'travel' from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat. While there is no observational evidence for wormholes, spacetimes containing wormholes are known to be valid solutions in general relativity. The term wormhole was coined by the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler in 1957. However, according to Coleman and Korte, p.199 of 'Hermann Weyl's Raum - Zeit - Materie and a General Introduction to His Scientific Work', Hermann Weyl invented the idea of wormholes in 1921 in connection with his analysis of mass in terms of electromagnetic field energy. This analysis forces one to consider situations..where there is a net flux of lines of force through what topologists would call a handle of the multiply-connected space and what physicists might perhaps be excused for more vividly terming a ‘wormhole’. – John Wheeler in Annals of Physics The name "wormhole" comes from an analogy used to explain the phenomenon. If a worm is travelling over the skin of an apple, then the worm could take a shortcut to the opposite side of the apple's skin by burrowing through its center, rather than travelling the entire distance around, just as a wormhole traveler could take a shortcut to the opposite side of the universe through a hole in higher-dimensional space. Type of Worm Holes Intra-universe wormholes connect one location of a universe to another location of the same universe (in the same present time or unpresent). A wormhole should be able to connect distant locations in the universe by creating a shortcut through spacetime, allowing travel between them that is faster than it would take light to make the journey through normal space. See the image above. Inter-universe wormholes connect one universe with another <1>, <2>. This gives rise to the speculation that such wormholes could be used to travel from one parallel universe to another. A wormhole which connects (usually closed) universes is often called a Schwarzschild wormhole. Another application of a wormhole might be time travel. In that case, it is a shortcut from one point in space and time to another. In string theory, a wormhole has been envisioned to connect two D-branes, where the mouths are attached to the branes and are connected by a flux tube <3>. Finally, wormholes are believed to be a part of spacetime foam <4>. There are two main types of wormholes: Lorentzian wormholes and Euclidean wormholes. Lorentzian wormholes are mainly studied in general relativity and semiclassical gravity, while Euclidean wormholes are studied in particle physics. Traversable wormholes are a special kind of Lorentzian wormholes which would allow a human to travel from one side of the wormhole to the other. Serguei Krasnikov suggested the term spacetime shortcut as a more general term for (traversable) wormholes and propulsion systems like the Alcubierre drive and the Krasnikov tube to indicate hyperfast interstellar travel.


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