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Asked by Benco Lam to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 16 Jun 2015.
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Connor Macrae answered on 16 Jun 2015:
With current technology I don’t believe so no. Wormholes (as shown in interstellar) are only a theoretical idea – there is no evidence for their existence, only some very complicated Maths. A spacecraft could be sent that would continue to accelerate until as close as possible to the speed of light, but it would take tens or hundreds of millions of years to reach another galaxy and would cost so much to undergo it will likely never occur. You have to remember, we are only now beginning to talk about sending people to Mars!
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Steven Thomson answered on 16 Jun 2015:
I haven’t seen Interstellar, but since Connor mentioned wormholes, I can say something about them!
A wormhole is an idea for a tunnel through space and time, connecting a black hole with the much rarer, never-yet-seen ‘white hole’. In the middle of the tunnel, though, is what’s called a singularity – it’s the most dense object in existence, with a gravitational pull that’s impossible to escape. So even if you could go in one end of a wormhole, you probably wouldn’t be able to get out again!
To avoid this, we’d need to make the wormhole wide enough that you wouldn’t pass too close to the singularity, but then you’d need to send in a material with a so-called ‘negative energy density’ and no such things exists!
It would be brilliant if we could travel to another galaxy, and maybe one day we’ll manage it, but right now we just don’t know how to do it!
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Jillian Scudder answered on 23 Jun 2015:
Not like Interstellar, with a magical wormhole out near Jupiter; as far as we know, even in the mathematical world, wormholes are really unstable and not prone to actually letting material go through them.
Full credit to the Interstellar team, though – in terms of what light would do if you could connect two regions of space without it collapsing into some kind of quantum foam – they got the look of the wormhole exactly right.
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