Are Wormholes real?

    Are Wormholes real?

Wormholes can be described by General Relativity. This suggests that a wormhole could exist. However, since the conditions needed for a wormhole to be created are hugely difficult to create - it needs things like 'exotic matter', matter with negative mass or pressure - they are not expected to exist in the universe. If they did, they would be detectable, and this is what this paper is exploring. The paper is not reporting on a detection of a wormhole, rather it is describing a method by which a wormhole, if it did exist, could be detected

When light passes by a massive object, the gravity of the object (or more accurately, the warping of the space around the object) bends the path of the light. The resulting distortion, and the bending itself, is known as gravitational lensing. When light is travelling from a background object to us and is bent by a massive object, the amount by which, and the way in which, the light is lensed tells us about the intervening object. This paper explores what you would see when the lensing object is a wormhole, and describes the tell-tale signature that would result. Should we see such a signal, then this would be proof that wormholes do exist, but it has not yet been observed.

Also, it should be noted that this article is not from Cornell. It is hosted on the Arxiv, a website run by Cornell, where scientists can upload papers for others to view before they are officially published. The authors of this paper work at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China.