When a wormhole reaches the end of its life, the 鈥渕ouths鈥� at either end may expand and get closer to one another before disconnecting and carrying on as regular black holes 鈥� and the trigger for this death could be any energy that perturbs the wormhole, including a person leaping in.
Wormholes are hypothetical tunnels between two black holes that connect distant regions of space-time or even separate universes. There is no observational evidence that they exist 鈥� nor that separate universes exist 鈥� but they are theoretically possible under the laws of physics as we know them.
Igor Novikov at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark and his colleagues used computer simulations to examine what would happen if a wormhole connecting two separate universes was pushed out of equilibrium, such as by being hit by a blast of energy.
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Previous work has shown that this could result in the two universes being united, but Novikov and his colleagues found that wasn鈥檛 the case. According to their calculations, the 鈥渢hroat鈥� of the wormhole 鈥� the tunnel connecting the two universes 鈥� would become wider and wider while shortening in length at the speed of light.
Eventually, the connection between the two black holes would disintegrate, leaving behind not a wormhole but a pair of black holes, each in the separate universe in which it started.
One way to push a wormhole out of equilibrium is by jumping into it. This would mean that travelling through a wormhole to a different universe is impossible and would simply sever the connection between the two universes, leaving the jumper falling into a regular black hole.
However, Don Marolf at at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says this calculation relies on a type of quantum field that is unlikely to exist. He says these types of wormholes 鈥渧iolate cherished principles in addition to there being no evidence for their existence鈥�. Therefore, a wormhole falling apart in this way is 鈥渁 hypothetical and highly unphysical event鈥�, he says.
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