Can the supermassive objects at the centers of galaxies be traversable wormholes? The first test of strong gravity for mm/sub-mm very long baseline interferometry facilities

By Cosimo Bambi. 2013

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The near future mm/sub-mm very long baseline interferometry experiments are ambitious projects aiming at imaging the “shadow” of the supermassive black hole candidate at the center of the Milky Way and of the ones in nearby galaxies. An accurate observation of the shape of the shadow can potentially test the nature of these objects and verify if they are Kerr black holes, as predicted by general relativity. However, previous work on the subject has shown that the shadows produced in other spacetimes are very similar to the one of the Kerr background, suggesting that tests of strong gravity are not really possible with these facilities in the near future. In this work, I instead point out that it will be relatively easy to distinguish black holes from wormholes, topologically nontrivial structures of the spacetime that might have been formed in the early Universe and might connect our Universe with other universes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f27ba26a8894fd18055c848f085d1319e46e81b

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, methodology): “See also Abramowicz et al. (2002) and Bambi (2013b) on this point.”
Wormholes, Warp Drives and Energy Conditions (2017, methodology): “In [35], it was suggested that the nature of supermassive objects at the centers of galaxies—traversable wormholes or black holes—could be tested by using mm/submmVLBI facilities.”
PHOTON RINGS AROUND KERR AND KERR-LIKE BLACK HOLES (2013, background): “Images of photon rings and accretion flows around black holes and some exotic objects in other theories of gravity were also analyzed by Bambi & Yoshida (2010), Amarilla et al. (2010), Bambi et al. (2012), Amarilla & Eiroa (2012), and Bambi (2013b).”
Shadows of spherically symmetric black holes and naked singularities (2018, methodology): “Shadows cast by horizonless exotic compact objects such as wormholes have also been a subject of great interest (Bambi 2013; Ohgami & Sakai 2015, 2016; Shaikh 2018).”
Influence of quintessence dark energy on the shadow of black hole (2020, methodology): “where we have adopted the 1/r2 profile as in [14].”