Huge cosmological riddle could be solved by wormholes, new study suggests

The universe is expanding and expanding at an ever accelerating rate — and minute wormholes that bore through the fabric of space-time might be culpable, a new study proposes.

Microscopic wormholes may be in fact driving the accelerated expansion of the cosmos, researchers say. These miniscule wormholes are continually being born from the vacuum of space by virtue of subtle quantum effects. If confirmed through experiments and observations, the wormholes could in fact become a valued source of info on quantum gravity — a theoretical amalgamation of the fundamental forces of the cosmos, frequently considered to be the Holy Grail of theoretical physics.

Numerous astronomical observations demonstrate that our cosmos is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Though, Einstein’s general theory of relativity states that if the cosmos contains only the species of particles and radiation we are aware of, such conduct of the fabric of space is impossible.

To reconcile the observations of cosmos expansion with this particular theory, researchers have proposed that space is filled with a mysterious entity that can’t be detected in space or ground-based experiments. This enigmatic substance, called dark energy, interacts very weakly with other kinds of matter and fields, so, there is presently no dependable information about its structure or origin.

In a fresh study published April 5 in Physical Review D, scientists proposed a bold new candidate for dark energy: subatomic-size wormholes — or tiny tunnels linking disparate points in space. According to the authors, these wormholes are continually being born and ruined in the vacuum of space by virtue of quantum effects. This is akin to how particles are fashioned near the event horizons of black holes, leading to Hawking radiation; or how electron-positron pairs are generated by a robust electric field — a phenomenon identified as the Schwinger effect.

But, the creation of these wormholes is to a certain extent different from those other phenomena because their mathematical description needs quantum effects in gravity to be accounted for — a task that’s far more complicated and poorly understood. These hitches in calculating quantum gravitational phenomena prevented the authors from precisely deriving the wormhole birth rate. Nevertheless, using an approach known as Euclidean quantum gravity, they displayed that if about 10 billion wormholes are spontaneously created per cubic centimeter per second, the energy they produce would be enough to explain the presently observed rate of the cosmos’s expansion.

“Although our result was derived on the grounds of Euclidean quantum gravity… 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 through email.