Distinguishing black holes and wormholes with orbiting hot spots

Abstract

The supermassive black hole candidates at the center of every normal galaxy might be wormholes created in the early Universe and connecting either two different regions of our Universe or two different universes in a Multiverse model. Indeed, the origin of these supermassive objects is not well understood, topological non-trivial structures like wormholes are allowed both in general relativity and in alternative theories of gravity, and current observations cannot rule out such a possibility. In a few years, the VLTI instrument GRAVITY will have the capability to image blobs of plasma orbiting near the innermost stable circular orbit of SgrA${}^{\ast }$, the supermassive black hole candidate in the Milky Way. The secondary image of a hot spot orbiting around a wormhole is substantially different from that of a hot spot around a black hole, because the photon capture sphere of the wormhole is much smaller. The radius of the photon capture sphere is independent of the hot spot model, and therefore its possible detection, which is observationally challenging but not out of reach, can unambiguously test if the center of our Galaxy harbors a wormhole rather than a black hole.

11 pages, 4 figures. v2: refereed version

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Cited by in corpus (29)

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• Wormholes in $R^2$-gravity within the $f(R,T)$ formalism
• Astrophysical Wormholes
• Epicyclic frequencies in static and spherically symmetric wormhole geometries
• Shadows of CPR black holes and tests of the Kerr metric
• Using iron line reverberation and spectroscopy to distinguish Kerr and non-Kerr black holes
• High energy collision of two particles in wormhole spacetimes
• Spinning test particle motion around a traversable wormhole
• Wormhole on the Brane with Ordinary Matter: The Broader View
• Traversable wormholes in the traceless $f(R,T)$ gravity
• Particle motion around a static axially symmetric wormhole
• Search for wormhole candidates in active galactic nuclei: radiation from colliding accreting flows
• Note on the Cardoso-Pani-Rico parametrization to test the Kerr black hole hypothesis
• Collisional Penrose Process in Rotating Wormhole Spacetime
• Rip cosmologies, Wormhole Solutions and Big Trip in the $f(T,\mathcal{T})$ theory of gravity
• Unimodular Gravity Traversable Wormholes
• Phantom energy supported wormhole model in $f(R,T)$ gravity assuming conformal motion
• Testing a class of non-Kerr metrics with hot spots orbiting SgrA${}^{\ast }$
• Singularities in static spherically symmetric configurations of General Relativity with strongly nonlinear scalar fields
• Lorentzian wormhole in the framework of loop quantum cosmology
• Constraining the Cardoso-Pani-Rico metric with future observations of SgrA${}^{\ast }$
• Observational signatures from higher-order images of moving hotspots in accretion disks
• Investigating non-Keplerian motion in flare events with astrometric data
• Search for Wormhole Candidates: Accreting Wormholes with Monopole Magnetic Fields
• Dynamical Wormhole Solutions in $f(R,T)$ Gravity
• Auto- and cross-correlations for multiple images of corotating hotspots in accretion disks
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• Timing of echoes in electromagnetic radiation from hot spots orbiting a Kerr black hole impostor