As is commonly known, using our telescopes, we can only see so much of the universe because of its faster than light expansion. However, although under normal circumstances it is impossible to see beyond the observable universe, but what if we aimed our telescope at a wormhole? Because Einstein proved that light is able to be bent by the influence of gravity and curvature of spacetime, would not the light traveling through the wormhole be bent in such a manner that it could potentially travel outside of the observable universe and then back to us. So could this act as a "window" of sorts to see farther than we can with conventional methods?
Asked
Active
Viewed 277 times
-1
-
3"but what if we aimed our telescope at a wormhole?" - the warranty is voided? – Alfred Centauri Jan 09 '16 at 03:09
2 Answers
1
You are presumably thinking of the type of wormhole, much beloved of science fiction writers, that links two distant parts of our universe. The trouble is that we have to theory to explain how such wormholes may arise or to describe the properties of such wormholes. The nearest is the Morris-Thorne geometry, but this links two asymptotically flat regions of spacetime and says nothing about the large scale topological structure. You can impose any arbitrary topology you want, but you need to appreciate that this need not and probably doesn't have any relationship to the real universe.
Having said this, light does indeed propagate through a Morris-Thorne wormhole and various interesting lensing effects can result. There is a review of this on the Living Reviews web site though this is written for physicists and will be inaccessible to laymen.
John Rennie
- 355,118
0
To answer the question: yes, if there were a wormhole (e.g. the Morris-Thorne type) with one mouth in our observable universe and the other mouth beyond, then yes: we could receive light from the otherwise unobservable universe.
johndecker
- 568