Writers of science fiction dreamed of it ... here Hyperspace came to reality! Or almost: this futuristic method of transport which allows travel faster than the speed of light could indeed be a reality, according to an American physicist. A "gateway" to another dimension or other Universes could be found in black holes.
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In an article published on the site The Conversation, Gaurav Khanna, professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, United States, unveiled the genesis of his theory. "My colleague Lior Burko and I have been studying black hole physics for more than two decades, and in 2016, Caroline Mallary, PhD student, inspired by Christopher Nolan's Blockbuster" Interstellar,” began to investigate whether [the main character] could survive his downfall in Gargantua - a fictional, supermassive, fast spinning black hole and about 100 million times the mass of the sun, “described the scientist.
Computer simulated models
The doctoral student built a computer model to reproduce any physical effects that an object could undergo, a ship for example, if it fell into the heart of a rotating black hole.
"What she discovered was that whatever the circumstances, an object falling into a rotating black hole would not be adversely affected as it passes through what is called the singularity of its horizon,” says the researcher.
According to him, penetrating a rotating black hole would have only insignificant to negligible effects. "In fact, there was no visible effect on the falling object," said Gaurav Khanna, who goes on to say that, ”it increases the feasibility of using large rotating black holes like portals for journeys into Hyperspace ". A sci-fi author's dream seems to be close at hand. With a few nuances…
Limits are still unreachable
"There are some important simplifying assumptions in Caroline Mallary's work […] Therefore, a logical follow-up to her work would be to do a comparable study in the context of a more realistic black hole [from the point of view of ‘astrophysics’],” Gaurav Khanna concedes. A project unfortunately quite unrealistic at the present time, according to the researcher's own admission.
"It goes without saying that we do not yet have the capacity to carry out real experiments inside or near black holes, so scientists are resorting to theories and modelling to develop an interpretation, performing forecasts and new discoveries,” Gaurav Khanna concludes. From science fiction to the astrophysical reality, there is still a leap... that we finally seem far from being able to cross.
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