A black hole circling a wormhole would emit weird gravitational waves
Gravitational wave detectors have already spotted mysterious black holes. But something even stranger might be next: wormholes. A black hole spiraling into a wormhole would create an odd pattern of ripples in spacetime that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories might be able to pick up, physicists report July 17 at arXiv.org. The waves would blink off and on as the black hole passed through the wormhole and then came back. Wormholes are hypothetical objects in which spacetime is curved into a tunnel that connects distant cosmic locales or potentially different universes (SN: 8/5/13). From the outside, wormholes can appear similar to black holes. But while an object that falls into a black hole is trapped there, something that falls into a wormhole could traverse through it to the other side. No evidence has been found that wormholes exist. “These are speculative for sure, with a capital S,” says physicist William Gabella...