

"Think about them like waves of an ocean," explains physicist Larry Ford of Tufts University, Boston. In the vacuum of space, some small regions of spacetime can be filled with negative energy, surrounded by regions of positive energy. It's this kind of mind-bending behaviour that allows exotic matter to prevent a wormhole from collapsing.Īlthough negative energy sounds weird, the laws of physics do permit it. And, even more bizarrely, to hit a negative-mass tennis ball, you wouldn't swing your racket toward it, but away. If Earth had negative mass and you were to let go of a ball on the planet’s surface, it would accelerate up, not down. (Following Sagan's cinematic legacy, Thorne's ideas also inspired the Interstellar movie.)Įxotic matter is weird because it has negative energy or negative mass, enabling it to act as a sort of antigravity. But to ensure that the wormhole stayed open, he discovered, you would need some strange stuff called exotic matter. Thorne realised that a wormhole might work best.

He sought the help of physicist Kip Thorne to see if there was a scientifically sound way for his character to make the journey.
Second galaxy wormhole guide movie#
In the 1980s, astronomer Carl Sagan was working on his novel Contact (the basis for the movie starring Jodie Foster), in which his heroine travels across the Universe.
Second galaxy wormhole guide zip#
These curious objects, though, were found to collapse so quickly that not even light could zip through them. Wormholes naturally emerge from the equations governing the theory of general relativity, Einstein's revolutionary notion that describes gravity as the warping of space and time, which forms the fabric of the universe called spacetime.Įinstein and Nathan Rosen published a paper in 1935 describing these wormholes, eventually dubbed Einstein-Rosen bridges. What does the science say about the feasibility of such travel? The mouth of a wormhole also acts as a cosmic window, allowing you to gaze at the stars on the opposite end of the universe. Manipulating space in this way means you can jump into one end of a wormhole, travel a short distance, and pop out from the other end in another galaxy.
