Wheeler's right

Wormhole pix

Oh Oh, it seems there might be wormholes, billions of them, knitting together the universe, something eloquently expressed in indirect fashion by John Wheeler and his revolutionary idea, From It to Bit.

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe. 

Note, this is NOT anthropomorphising, its the move from analog to digital, the ultimate collapse of the wave function enabling the universe to function as a consistent entity until the end of time.

John Archibald Wheeler

The signal

In 2019, LIGO and Virgo recorded something truly bizarre – a gravitational wave event less than a tenth of a second in duration.

Compared to the drawn-out chirps of black hole binaries on decaying orbital spirals, it was a sharp crack. The best explanation of the event, named GW190521, was a chance encounter of two black holes snaring each other in passing.

Now, a new paper has presented an alternative, far more exotic option: the echo of a black hole collision in another universe, reverberating through a collapsing wormhole that formed as a result of that merger.

To be clear, the black hole collision right here in our own Universe is still the preferred interpretation of the strange signal… but that preference is not strong enough to rule out the wormhole model entirely, writes a team led by physicist Qi Lai of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in a preprint uploaded to arXiv.

The details ...

A numerical simulation of the curvature of space-time during the merger that produced GW190521.
(AG Bernuzzi/University of Jena)

Of the 90 or so mergers detected so far, however, one stands out as very peculiar. Detected in May 2019, GW190521 emitted space-time ripples like no other.

"Its morphology and explosion-like structure are very different from previous observations," says astrophysicist Rossella Gamba of the University of Jena in Germany.

She adds, "GW190521 was initially analyzed as the merger of two rapidly rotating heavy black holes approaching each other along almost circular orbits, but its special features led us to propose other possible interpretations."

Something's afoot.  - Sherlock Holmes