Thursday, December 27, 2018

general relativity - How long would it take to travel through a wormhole?


Assuming wormholes exist and you put some matter into one, how long would it take to reach the other end versus how far apart the two ends are? Basically, by how much does a wormhole stretch spacetime?



Answer



There's a recent popularization of wormhole physics that nicely lists the properties of the four wormhole examples that Morris and Thorne considered in their 1988 paper. These properties include traversal times. Here's a summary




  1. Infinite-Exotic-Region Wormhole (exotic matter distributed throughout space) ~ 1 hour





  2. Large-Exotic-Region Wormhole (exotic matter confined to large finite radius) >= 7 days




  3. Medium-Exotic-Region Wormhole (exotic matter loosely restricted to throat) ~ 200 days




  4. Small-Exotic-Region Wormhole (exotic matter closely restricted to throat) >= 0.7 seconds





Morris and Thorne referred to the last example as "absurdly benign". It is not dissimilar to the thin-shell wormholes considered by Visser.


These times are completely independent of the distances between the mouths of each wormhole in normal space.


Source: The Physics of Stargates -- Parallel Universes, Time Travel, and the Enigma of Wormhole Physics, by Enrico Rodrigo (2010), Chapter 5


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