Black holes are ‘doors’ to another world

Giving fresh hope to those who fear humankind may one day be consumed by the galactic plug holes, the world-renowned British scientist unveiled his latest theory at a specialist conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Black holes are doors to other parts of the universe, according to a new study. But you wouldn’t ever get to come back.

Until now, it was the theoretical 'wormhole' that was regarded as the portal to alternative dimensions. However, Prof. Hawking described how he has become aware of a theoretical way “by which information from matter taken into a black hole is actually returned out of them".

Anyone who managed to get through one of the mysterious doors would end up “spaghettified”, and stretched out like a long strand of pasta, according to the research. They’d get squished back down to size once they reached the other side, but it’s unlikely they’d be alive to see it.

It was widely held that any information (such as DNA) about the physical make-up of anything going into a black hole would be lost, which is clearly impossible under the laws physicists work under. But Hawking is convinced the information has to go somewhere - either by being zapped into a new dimension elsewhere or processed within the black hole and ending up like a hologram of itself on the outside edge of the structure.

Previously, scientists have held that all matter inside of a black hole is destroyed and so there would be no way of ever actually making it through. but the new research suggests that it could act as a doorway or a tunnel – as in a sci-fi story.

Black holes are places where matter has been squashed to such a density by gravity that the normal laws of physics break down. The new theory rejects the view that at the centre of a black hole spacetime curves to an infinite point known as a "singularity" and all matter is destroyed.

Instead, it proposes that the heart of the simplest type of electrically charged, non-rotating black hole, is a very small spherical surface. This acts as a "wormhole" - a doorway or tunnel through the fabric of spacetime of the kind seen in countless sci-fi stories. In the movie interstellar, a team of astronauts travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity. Dr gonzalo olmo, from the university of valencia in spain, said: "our theory naturally resolves several problems in the interpretation of electrically-charged black holes.

"In the first instance, we resolve the problem of the singularity, since there is a door at the centre of the black hole, the wormhole, through which space and time can continue." The wormhole predicted by the scientists' equations is smaller than an atomic nucleus, but gets bigger as more electrical charge is stored in the black hole.

A hypothetical traveller entering the black hole could be stretched thin enough to fit through the wormhole, like a strand of cotton threaded through the eye of a needle. The new model also gets round the need for "exotic" energy or matter to create a wormhole.

According to albert einstein's theory of gravity, a wormhole can only appear in the presence of matter with highly unusual properties, possessing negative energy, pressure or density. Such "exotic matter" has never been observed. "In our theory, the wormhole appears out of ordinary matter and energy, such as an electric field," said Dr olmo.

The interest in wormholes for theoretical physics goes beyond generating tunnels or doors in space-time to connect two points in the universe. They would also help explain phenomena such as quantum entanglement or the nature of elementary particles. Thanks to this new interpretation, the existence of these objects could be closer to science than fiction.