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Supermassive Black Hole At the Centre of Galaxy May Be Wormhole In Disguise
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "There is growing evidence that the center of the Milky Way contains a mysterious object some 4 million times more massive than the Sun. Many astronomers believe that this object, called Sagittarius A*, is a supermassive black hole that was crucial in the galaxy's birth and formation. The thinking is that about 100 million years after the Big Bang, this supermassive object attracted the gas and dust that eventually became the Milky Way. But there is a problem with this theory--100 million years is not long enough for a black hole to grow so big. The alternative explanation is that Sagittarius A* is a wormhole that connects the Milky Way to another region of the universe or even a another multiverse. Cosmologists have long known that wormholes could have formed in the instants after the Big Bang and that these objects would have been preserved during inflation to appear today as supermassive objects hidden behind an event horizon, like black holes. It's easy to imagine that it would be impossible to tell these objects apart. But astronomers have now worked out that wormholes are smaller than black holes and so bend light from an object orbiting close to them, such as a plasma cloud, in a unique way that reveals their presence. They've even simulated what such a wormhole will look like. No telescope is yet capable of resolving images like these but that is set to change too. An infrared instrument called GRAVITY is currently being prepared for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile and should be in a position to spot the signature of a wormhole, if it is there, in the next few years."
This is where He lives.
Lies.
Everyone knows you can only keep a wormhole open for 38 minutes.
Is there any real evidence that a wormhole would actually pass anything to a remote location, or is that just a writers fantasy? Usually travel does not include being disassembled to your constituent parts midway. OK. Call me a doubter!
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Worms crawling in and out?
Because at some point, you enter the tube. When you do, the light you reflect gets sucked in with you rather than released out.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
has a lot of mass... so... this might a difference without distinction.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Wormholes involve extreme curvature of space-time. That means a large amount of energy. Energy is equivalent to mass, via E=mc^2, so a wormhole will have a large effective mass. That much mass in a small volume means an event horizon.
Or, if you prefer the geometric argument, extreme space-time curvature IS extremely strong gravity.
I don't really understand why a wormhole would have a smaller event horizon though. Perhaps something to do with the mass distribution. In a wormhole the mass would all be at the centre. In a black hole that grew through accretion it would be distributed throughout the volume.
Given the intense environment around Sag A*, even if it turns out to be a wormhole it will be utterly non-traversable. However, there are hypotheses that wormholes to be stabilized require using negative matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass. At least, that's the most plausible mechanism suggested- so this would be inadvertent evidence that negative matter exists, which would be a really big deal. There's also speculation that a cosmic string could do something similar- note that a cosmic string is topological defect in space time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string- these are not the strings from string theory although many forms of string theory would predict that such objects would exist. And of course, if wormholes exist in nature there's some small chance we can either make our own o find much smaller ones and put them to use. Unfortunately, there's a lot of dust and other debris between where we are and Sag A*, so even GRAVITY may have trouble getting enough resolution to figure this out.
The point here is that the concept of a worm-hole has been theoretical and the domain of Sci-Fi. It is a huge event if we are able to verify. My guess is that the verification will have ramifications in the theoretical physics, simply because so much has been strictly theory.
of course, we don't even know that black holes exist, quantum gravity might preclude it, or dense enough matter instead forms quark stars, q stars, preon star, etc. instead of black hole. Care should be taken to see if one of these alternatives to black holes can be detected by GRAVITY findings
we don't know wormholes exist, certain solutions to General Relativity have them but again we don't know if physically possible to form.
I am surprised they don't mention the Event Horizon Telescope, which could resolve this.
There are too many pseudo-science stories on Slashdot these days. Are you listening, editors? It's like reading Scientific American (which was almost as bad as Omni last time I read it).
Here we have a whole huge paragraph full of fantasized bullshit whose only supporting documents are a speculative paper submitted to arXiv, and a brief regurgitation thereof on some arXiv blog.
Please stop wasting my time. I want to read NEWS for Nerds (where "news" means "as factually verifiable as possible") and stuff that MATTERS (and pseudo science speculation does not matter to me).
Thank you.
let me preface that i have loved astronomy and space my entire life, so no hate here...
my first wall poster when i was 8 was a map of the local group that i got out of a natgeo...this was 40 years ago and at the time i remember my mind utterly being blown by that map and the realization of how tiny i was.
my problem with modern cosmology is, however, the new trend that propose theories with no testable means of proving them. i understand that with cutting edge theory sometimes there may be a lag between the idea and the ability to test, but at some point theories that are non-testable should be dropped from the scientific canon.
personally, i like to limit theory proposals to those that can somehow be proved by the scientific method, and keep others in scifi.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Picture or it doesn't exist!
...that i am excited that this theory seems to fall into the "testable" catagory and that makes it quite exciting to me.
sorry i hit Submit before adding that thought...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
This is really a problem of the "dark ages" - roughly, red shifts between 1400 and 14 (i.e., the period between just after the cosmic microwave background up to the earliest quasars and galaxies). At one end, there are no black holes, at the other, there are supermassive ones, what happens in between, we don't really know. My own personal guess is that this is a consequence of dark matter, and thus wouldn't require worm-holes but, if we can test the wormhole hypothesis, we should. We know so little about the dark ages that IMHO no possibility should be ignored.
Finally a stable wormhole for our FTL travel needs. Now, since Sagitarius A is 26,000 lightyears away, all we need to do is build some sort of wormhole network to get us there, and then FTL travel will be ours!
One of the big ones, like the one that was used to travel to the Collectors' homeworld.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
"There is growing evidence that the center of the Milky Way contains a mysterious object some 4 million times more massive than the Sun"
No, that's a proven and well known fact actually.
I recommend that we gather up all the world's warrior mentality politicians who are always dragging people into wars and bullshit, put them in uniforms, and send them on a mission through the event horizon to determine if there's another world on the other side of the wormhole, or if they just get squished like bugs.
Somebody has to do it: solve the Schroedinger question. Is it a wormhole or a black hole? Or is it a quantum object that changes between the two randomly as you observe it?
The politicians have a need to know. Send them soon. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Intuitively, the event horizon of a black hole is larger because it represents the entire mass and only has one "end". A wormhole would have 2 (or more?) event horizons, effectively splitting it's mass between them, right? The mass-energy, when applied to a multiply-connected region of space-time, should result in locally diluted curvature because it has more space-time connected to it to bend and absorb said energy.
Seconded, in part. Can anyone offer insight?
So it makes sense to me that a wormhole would have a massive gravitational field - as I understand it a wormhole is theorized to be a place where the fabric of spacetime gets "stretched into the 'distance'", not unlike what matter does, except that instead of having a giant mass at the center its linked to a similar spot somewhere else, so that the "tension" between the two interconnected regions of spacetime maintain the distortion rather than a large concentration of mass-energy.
But why would a wormhole be expected to have an event horizon? Or does the term mean something fundamentally different in relation to a wormhole than a black hole? And if it means the same thing (the point at which light can't escape) why would the event horizon be smaller for the same effective mass? If it has the same effective gravitational profile as a particular mass of black hole at range, then a naive assumption that gravity falls off as 1/r^2 would imply its event horizon should have the same radius.
It seems to me that a wormhole would actually be less likely to have an event horizon than a black hole of similar gravitational intensity - a black hole is theorized to be created when the gravitational force gets so large that it exceeds even the strong nuclear force, and the matter collapses completely. But a wormhole has no matter to collapse - it seems like a spacetime "tunnel" could potentially exist at truly staggering gravitational gradients without triggering a catastrophic collapse.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"The thinking is that about 100 million years after the Big Bang, this supermassive object attracted the gas and dust that eventually became the Milky Way. But there is a problem with this theory--100 million years is not long enough for a black hole to grow so big. The alternative explanation is that Sagittarius A* is a wormhole..."
No, the widely accepted alternative (aka, the actual mainstream consensus) is that the supermassive black hole and the galaxy grew together, not that the black hole came first and was supermassive before the galaxy existed. This wormhole theory is an answer to a question no one is asking.
I don't really understand why a wormhole would have a smaller event horizon though.
Wormhole theories I've seen require exotic matter (that with a negative mass) to keep them open. Perhaps the mass and the negative mass cancel each other out to create a smaller event horizon.
(that's only half a joke. I have no idea what the properties of a negative mass would be)
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Just a random thought: Your civilization figured out how to travel FTL, or very close to speed of light. You are also advanced enough to easily avoid obstacles such as asteroid collisions, high radiation etc. Where would you go to search for other intelligent species from outskirt of the galaxy where you evolved? I think going to downtown (to the center of the galaxy) makes the perfect sense. Suns are closer, other species come to this place to study about the galaxy. So, basically this is the perfect place to meet other civilizations. Unlike searching in the boonies (what we are doing at the moment).
LiFe iS bEAuTiFul
Just send Beowulf Schaeffer with the Long Shot already.
I bet it's full of mismatched socks.
Some settling may occur during posting.
Wormholes are one of the great disapointments of exotic physics, because they can't actually be used for anything.
Yay, a FTL portal to the distant universe! That... no object can traverse. Including light. Oh.
Much like entanglement, which promises instantainous action over any distance and thus FTL communication - but, on closer examination, can't be used to send classical information.
on Arxiv is peer reviewed or even 'good' science. This would seem to fall under that category.
There's a statement of oblivious credulity! I prefer the version which runs thusly:
Gilgamesh had two such dreams, first of a shooting star ("a lump of Anu") which fell on him -- so heavy he could not lift nor move it. The land of Uruk encompassed it. The people thronged about it, and Gilgamesh embraced it like a wife. In the second dream Gilgamesh saw an axe fall over the assembly of Uruk, and he hugged it as if it were his wife, too. Puzzled as to their meaning, he went to his mother, the wise goddess Ninsun, who "untied the dreams." She told him that both the star of heaven and the axe were his companion who was coming. "This companion is powerful, has awesome strength, and is able to save a friend."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
A black holes event horizon is a consequence of its massive gravitational field, so if you get that a wormhole should also have a massive gravitational field than the event horizon would follow from that.
And from my understanding, it's not the event horizon they are saying is smaller in the wormhole, it is the wormhole itself. So I think it is something like a difference in the tidal force, a more concentrated source of a gravitational field would have a stronger tidal force which can be detected.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
It's a super stargate
... that sinking feeling that everything we know is swirling around the drain.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
On the contrary, everywhere in the known universe (according to the cosmological principle) that formula holds true.
The formula describes the relationship between rest mass (invariant) and rest energy. Obviously it gets more complicated if you need to handle different frames of reference, and even then not really importantly until velocity approaches that of light.
Then we simply use E=m(relativistic)^2
Would gravitational pull spill in through a wormhole?
If so, would an object's gravitation pull be a sort of temporally-offset vector sum of its original pull and the effect passing through the wormhole?
The problem I see is that a black hole is assumed to have collapsed into a singularity so that the gravitational field increases without bound as you approach it, eventually forming an event horizon. A wormhhole on the other hand is *not* a singularity, and it's possible the mouth could be larger than the hypothetical event horizon radius, resulting in a discontinuity in the gravitational gradient as it normalizes within the wormhole rather than continuing to intensify.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Soooo parasitic species do not exists in your world, symbiotic species do not exists in your world, domestic species do not exists in your world etc...etc... I am happy to live in this world where natural selection led a lot of species come with far more inventive solution than kill or be killed.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
where does this 'wormhole' lead and when? the logic behind my question. black holes are known to disrupt time and space. so if somehow you could go inside the aoe of the hole and preform some sly moves to get out what time would you be at (relative to the time before going through the wormhole) and most importantly, where? I believe the emphasis on what 'sly moves' are preformed contribute to the result. oh, I get it now... the place where you end up is the place surrounding the black hole along the black hole's physical location on the fabric of space & time ! black holes move I think so if a black hole moves 1 AU in any time frame then the manoeuvres needed to travel the distance of where the black hole was to where it is now whilst residing in the black hole's aoe would probably require more energy than it would take just travelling there classically. but... if the black hole was of a certain size and moving at a sufficient velocity relative to where you wanted to go you could save some energy and just hitch a ride on the black hole to get to your destination faster. I.e like a gravitational slingshot into the space of a specific time. Time travel is really not so hard to get your head around. if everything in a specific space seems slower than everything else and you are inside that space then everything else will go faster than you. To go backwards in time you need to actually break the speed of light limit, make a impossibly sharp hook turn, travel to where and when you want to be then make another impossibly sharp hook turn and then slow down to the present time & space. Why Einstein says you need infinite energy to go FTL. you can't use mass to escape mass. You need anti matter to escape a black hole, Alot of it... Sounds dangerous? it is considering you are dealing with energies exponentially higher than the energy of of a human. I'm talking trillions upon trillions of levels higher.
Great, where are your measurements, Corny?
36, 24, 36.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yo mama so fat, her business card reads "Sagittarius A"
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Wouldn't a wormhole technically have a much larger volume of 3D spacetime to spread it's mass in, since a good deal of the mass can extend down into the wormhole and along it - which would mean it's quite literally out of the plane of ordinary space.
Well, you're making an assumption as to the nature of the wormhole "tube" and what happens to matter inside it. It could be that there is no tube at all. There's just an opening that goes from one point in spacetime to another. We really have no idea, as wormholes are the product of science fiction, and there isn't anything in physics that would enable such a structure besides a negative mass, and there is no theoretical avenue by which such a thing could exist.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
According to Stephen Braham This piece misinterprets the research. There's pretty much zero chance that Sag A* is a wormhole (and, given that I did my PhD on them, I'm biased to wanting wormholes)! The paper is about how you'd know if it was, and not on any evidence that Sag A* isn't a usual accretion-formed BH.
Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
...if it were, we would be able to see all the biros (http://www.earthstar.co.uk/biros.htm)
That does make for an interesting idea - if the center of every galaxy has wormholes, and every advanced civilization discovers this, and they can be used for travel.....
Maybe the reason we have not seen any alien civilizations is that they all congregate towards the center of the galaxy. Then we would not see them because we are out towards the rim, in a backwater if you will.
Makes for an interesting thought at least.
As long as this wormhole eats this god-forsaken planet. I picture it as a massive wood chipper sucking in planets and discharging energy out of the other end. In other words, earth as we know it is the equivalent to a beer fart.
What if we've been looking at it all wrong. We tend to view this gravity well as the repository of a mass. What if instead it was these super massive black holes are really remnants of the universe's primordial gravitational field immediately prior to/at the time of inflation. Think about it topographically. We live on an inflation driven membrane of space-time, driven outward by inflation yet pinned to the universe through the gravitational field at our galaxy's center. Nothing fell in, we fell out.
I get annoyed reading lines like: "There is growing evidence that the center of the Milky Way contains a mysterious object some 4 million times more massive than the Sun."
What evidence do we have? How is it growing? How big is it now? How much does it grow?
I mean, are we talking a mustard seed of evidence here? (Yes, iron analogy to use in science, I know ;-)
After reading the article, science is making a guess that wormholes are smaller than black holes. There is no scientific basis behind this guess. It is just a guess. So this article assumes that because Sagittarius A is small it is a worm hole, not a black hole.
So basically we are in the hypothesis phase, not even in the theory phase yet.
Great, where are your measurements, Corny?
36, 24, 36.
Those are fairly disturbing for somebody named "Jeremiah."
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Well, we are talking about "my" measurements, or the measurements I have taken?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
lead us to Bajor?