Any Volunteers to Be the First to Travel Through a Wormhole?

Science fiction has long imagined wormholes as a means of traversing the great distances between the stars in short, by human standard, timespans. Such literary devices allow spaceships, in essence, to cover great distances in hours or days instead of centuries that normal space travel would require. Wormholes connect two points in space in a way that the distance between them through the wormhole is much shorter than the distance between them in normal space, like taking a cosmic shortcut.

General relativity tells us that to make a wormhole requires enormous amounts of negative energy which, according to Einstein’s equations, isn’t possible. But, the other grand realm of physics, quantum mechanics, says not so fast.

In a study titled “Humanly traversable wormholes,” Juan Maldacena of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study and Alexey Milekhin, a graduate of astrophysics student also at Princeton University, claim that we can make such wormholes. They base their calculations on the Randall-Sundrum II model, a theory that postulates a five-dimensional, warped geometry for the universe instead of the one we are familiar with that contains only normal four dimensions. Maldecena and Milekhin claim, using that theory, stable, person-sized wormholes could be created.

                                             Spaceship entering a wormhole. Credit NASA

You have to start, the researchers say, with a black hole that has a large magnetic charge. Such a special wormhole would allow spacefarers to traverse, say, 10,000 lightyears, one-tenth of the way across our galaxy, in a second. The only problem is that to the people at either end of the wormhole, that trip would appear to take 10,000 years, meaning these special wormholes really create shortcuts through time rather than space.

I bet they could still find volunteers willing to take that trip.

  

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com. 

Martian Life, if it Exists, Could Still Be Present Underground

 

Earth sits right in the middle of our sun’s habitable zone, the region where the heat of the star allows liquid water to exist on the surface of a planet. Mars orbits at the outer edge of this zone. Astronomers generally agree that Mars once sported rivers, lakes and, oceans. Mars reached such life-supporting conditions even before Earth. Its smaller size allowed it to cool more quickly from the heat of formation.

But Mars’ smaller size also allowed its core to cool and solidify long ago, killing its magnetic field. Without that magnetic field, solar radiation slowly knocked the atmosphere of Mars into space. Lacking an atmosphere, Mars couldn’t trap the sun’s heat, so it turned cold. Nighttime temperatures routinely drop to near 100 degrees below zero.

But, prior to the loss of its atmosphere, Mars sported conditions that could have supported life. That is no longer true of the surface of Mars. The thin atmosphere can no longer warm the surface of Mars nor protect it from cosmic radiation. Many scientists, including astrophysicist and research scientist Dimitra Atri, from the Center for Space Science at NYU Abu Dhabi, believe that conditions not far below the surface could potentially support life, albeit only at the bacterial level.

In 2022, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos, the Russian space organization, will launch the ExoMars craft, which includes the Rosiland Franklin rover. Atri says that rover will have the ability to detect any such subsurface life on the Red Planet. "It is exciting to contemplate that life could survive in such a harsh environment, as few as two meters (six feet) below the surface of Mars," said Atri. "When the Rosalind Franklin rover onboard the ExoMars mission, equipped with a subsurface drill, is launched in 2022, it will be well-suited to detect extant microbial life."

                           ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, Credit European Space Agency (ESA).

If we find life on Mars, it will indicate that life forms easily, given that life developed on both planets in our solar system capable of supporting it. That tells astronomers that perhaps many of the tens of billions of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy likely did, too.

     Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

     This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com.