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July 22 (UPI) -- NASA's latest deep-space telescope continues to shock astronomers and amateurs with jaw-dropping new images captured from the outer reaches of the cosmos. The James Webb Space Telescope appears to have pictured a wormhole spinning in the "Phantom Galaxy," a place whose very center scientists believe may contain a black hole. "I've been doing this for 10 years now, and [Webb] data is new, different and exciting," Judy Schmidt, who processed raw data from NASA into a stunning photo of the Phantom Galaxy, told Space.com. "Of course I'm going to make something with it." The latest images...

The simplest way to construct a wormhole is to "extend" the idea of a black hole with its mirror image, the white hole. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, hence the reason wormholes are sometimes called "Einstein-Rosen bridges". This creates a tunnel through space-time. Einstein and Rosen constructed their wormhole with the usual Schwarzschild metric, and most analyses of wormholes use that same metric. So physicist Pascal Koiran at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France tried something else: using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric instead. His paper, described in October in the preprint database arXiv, is...

A traversable wormhole would be a shortcut through space. (ESO/L. Calçada) =============================================================== In my last post, I talked about the idea of warp drive and whether it might one day be possible. Today I'll talk about another faster-than-light trick: wormholes. Wormholes are an old idea in general relativity. It's based on work by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who tried to figure out how elementary particles might behave in curved spacetime. Their idea treated particle-antiparticle pairs as two ends of a spacetime tube. This Einstein-Rosen Bridge would look like a black hole on one end, and an anti-black hole,...

Device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an “extra special dimension”Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space. "This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible," said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. "From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension."...

~snip~ In 1967 British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left stunned by mysterious pulsing signals she detected coming from outside the solar system. For months she suggested the signals could be of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but they were later proven to be rapidly spinning stars known as pulsars. However, a new series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), has again got astronomers scratching their heads and wondering if, maybe, we’re picking up alien messages...

Is it a message from far beyond out own galaxy? A brief mysterious pulse detected by Arecibo telescope has baffled boffins. The discovery of a split-second burst of radio waves by scientists using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico raises major new questions over what caused it. The finding by an international team of astronomers, published July 10 in The Astrophysical Journal, marks the first time that a so-called 'fast radio burst' has been detected using an instrument other than the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel, have you seen the movie "Interstellar?") and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable." This is the hypothesis put forward in a study published in Annals of Physics and conducted with the participation of SISSA in Trieste. The paper, the result of a collaboration between Indian, Italian and North American researchers, prompts scientists to re-think dark matter. "If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the...

Quantum entanglement, a perplexing phenomenon of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” could be even spookier than Einstein perceived. Physicists at the University of Washington and Stony Brook University in New York believe the phenomenon might be intrinsically linked with wormholes, hypothetical features of space-time that in popular science fiction can provide a much-faster-than-light shortcut from one part of the universe to another. But here’s the catch: One couldn’t actually travel, or even communicate, through these wormholes, said Andreas Karch, a UW physics professor. Quantum entanglement occurs when a pair or a...

The pre-dawn phenomenon, which looks like a huge bubble expanding and then popping, was recorded June 22 by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the Subaru Telescope. Since then, speculation has run rampant about the source of the early morning flash. Ichi Tanaka, a support astronomer at Subaru Telescope, describes it as "a huge halo of light above the eastern horizon," adding, "It was slowly expanding to over 45 degrees in five minutes or more."

New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner toasted the one-year anniversary of Obamacare this week -- and accidentally spilled his champagne glass all over the disastrous, one-size-fits-all mandate. Ostensibly one of the federal health care law's staunchest defenders, Weiner exposed its ultimate folly by pushing for a special cost-saving regulatory exemption for New York City. If it's good for the city Weiner wants to be mayor of, why not for each and every individual American and American business that wants to be free of Obamacare's shackles? Weiner joins a bevy of the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's" loudest cheerleaders --...

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-------------------------------------------------------- HOUSE PASSES REAL I.D. ACT By a vote of 261-161, the House of Representatives last week passed The REAL I.D. Act (H.R. 418) which will help prevent illegal aliens from obtaining driver's licenses, tighten asylum abuse, seal a porous section along the Mexican border near San Diego, and expand the grounds for deportation in terrorism-related cases. Despite a few concerns raised over one "waiver" provision (and whether or not this bill could lead to a national I.D. card), Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and the vast majority of House Republicans voted in favor of its passage. Now the bill moves...

The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...

Quantum wormholes could carry people   18:10 23 May 02   Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition   All around us are tiny doors that lead to the rest of the Universe. Predicted by Einstein's equations, these quantum wormholes offer a faster-than-light short cut to the rest of the cosmos - at least in principle. Now physicists believe they could open these doors wide enough to allow someone to travel through. Quantum wormholes are thought to be much smaller than even protons and electrons, and until now no one has modelled what happens when something passes through one. So Sean Hayward at...