By Ron Cowen
Some stars may contain wormholes, throatlike tunnels connecting distant points in spacetime, a team of physicists proposes. But other researchers are having a hard time swallowing the idea.
“It’s a nice piece of speculative work, but it is speculation,” says theoretical physicist Matt Visser of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
In an article posted online at arXiv.org February 25, physicist Vladimir Folomeev of the Institute of Physicotechnical Problems and Material Science in the Kyrgyz Republic and his colleagues suggest that pairs of stars could be joined by wormholes constructed of an exotic material known as “phantom matter.” Strictly hypothetical, the stuff has been proposed as a possible explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe. Its exotic properties could also enable phantom matter to keep a wormhole propped open.