Wormholes are interesting to scientists and science fiction writers because there is a possibility that wormholes could link two regions in space that are far apart. What are wormholes? An astrophysicist explains these shortcuts through space-timeĪlthough we can say what a wormhole is, we do not know how to create one, so we cannot know if exotic matter can make wormholes.

We have never detected negative matter, and we do not even know what it would look like, but it is something that we can put into equations and understand how it would behave if it did exist. The physicist Kip Thorne proposed that negative matter would be needed to keep a wormhole stable once it has formed.

Matter with a negative mass would push other matter away from it. All matter we know has a positive mass and is attracted to other matter due to gravity – like an apple falling to Earth. One type of exotic matter that could be related to wormholes is matter with negative mass. A wormhole has two mouths that can be separated by an enormous distance, and the tunnel itself is called the “throat”. Where the tunnel comes out into space it is called the “mouth”.

Because space and time are so closely connected, we often talk about space-time when investigating how the universe works.Ī wormhole is formed by space-time curving in such a way that a tunnel forms between two separate regions in the universe. The more curved space is, then the slower time passes. This curving of space caused by matter also affects time. When objects move around the Earth they follow the bent space which makes them fall towards Earth. Nobel Foundation archive/Wikimedia Commonsįor example, Earth is made of matter, and it makes the space around it bend. Albert Einstein in 1921, when he won the Nobel Prize for physics.

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