WORM HOLES-SHORTCUTS IN THE UNIVERSE.

 Wormholes were first theorized by an Austrian Physicist in 1916 by using Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. He described a white hole which is a theoretical reversal of the black hole and said that entrances to Black and White Holes would be connected by a space time conduit.

In 1935 Einstein along with another scientist named Rosen elaborated on the idea and proposed the existence of bridges through space time. These bridges connect two different points in space time, theoretically creating a shortcut in the Universe that could reduce travel time and distance by an enormous amount. These shortcuts are known as Wormholes.

Lot of speculation has gone into travel through Wormholes. However, so far except for theoretical proof we have not discovered any such Wormhole. In fact as per theory the Wormholes collapse very quickly and therefore travel through them is impossible. Moreover, theoretical Wormholes are microscopic in size, of the order of 10^-33 centimetres, so there is no question of humans traveling through them. But it may be possible that with the expanding Universe they may have grown bigger in size, but how big we can again only speculate.

However, as long as we do not find the existence of a Wormhole in the Universe, all this becomes pure speculation and romantic imagination without any basis. The scientific equations simply give out the existence of Wormholes on a microscopic scale, but those too collapse very quickly. More than this the theory does not talk of the possibility of humans traveling through Wormholes, which in turn is impossible with the theoretical set of properties given to Wormholes. The physics in the Wormholes is utterly different from our own, and it is postulated that they contain exotic types of matter.

Therefore, so far this remains a fanciful theory and we have not found any Wormholes, let alone travel through them. These wormholes, if they do exist may be spotted by the way their gravity affects other bodies located near to them.

QUASARS (QUASI STELLAR RADIO SOURCES)-BRIGHTEST OBJECTS IN THE UNIVERSE.

Quasars are the brightest objects known to us in the Universe. A single Quasar outshines an entire galaxy like the Milky Way by 10 to 100,000 times.

We consider our Sun as the most powerful, but the Sun is an average star in the Milky Way Galaxy. Milky Way consists of 100,000 crore stars like the sun, and the collective energy emitted by it is enormous. How a single Quasar out shines such enormous collection of stars is puzzling. 

Astronomers postulate that to emit such massive amounts of energy, all the Quasars must have super massive black holes in their center. The black holes at the center of Qasars have millions or even billion times our Suns mass. 

We know how black holes come into being, but no one knows how these super massive black holes in the center of the Quasars came about, and research on that is on. These black holes have to be much more massive than any of the ordinary black holes known to us, and astronomers and scientists do not have any theoretical explanation as to how they formed.  

If the brightest Quasar visible from earth,  3c273 is brought to a distance of some 30 light years away from the earth, then it would shine as bright as the Sun.  That Quasar is 4 trillion (4 lac crore) times as luminous as our Sun. A study had found evidence of Molecular Oxygen in this Quasar and it is for the first time that Oxygen had been found outside the Milky Way.

There are only about 2000 Quasars known to us of which the nearest to us is Markarian 231  which is about 600 million light years away. The farthest Quasar known to us is ULAS J1120 which is about 12.9 billion light years away. That means we are seeing the Quasar as it was 12.9 billion years ago very near to the time of Big Bang which happened 13.8 billion years ago.

At the rate Quasars shine and use up all the surrounding matter and convert into energy, they would have consumed all the matter and would be dead a long time ago. Therefore, it is likely that the Universe is currently devoid of any Quasar.

 

ANTIMATTER AND UNIVERSE

All of us who read science know that ordinary matter consists of atoms. The atoms in turn consist of the positively charged protons and the neutral Neutrons in the nucleus. The negatively charged electrons orbit the nucleus.

In antimatter, the charges are reversed. The orbiting electrons would have a positive charge and the protons in the nucleus have a negative charge. The electrons of antimatter are known as Positrons, Protons as Antiprotons, and Neutrons as Antineutrons. This too is known to most of the science students. 

Antimatter was first predicted by the English physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. Dirac said that every particle in the universe had a mirror image. The American physicist Carl Anderson discovered the Positron in 1932 and Dirac received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 while Anderson got it in 1936.

When particles of matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other and produce energy. The laws of physics for particles and antiparticles are the same.

At the time of Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been present, but today there is very less antimatter left in the Universe. What can be the reason for that is difficult to understand. Perhaps an explanation can be that originally there is much more matter than antimatter like today and so most of the antimatter got annihilated by coming into contact with ordinary matter. That is only a probability, but the scientists see no reason why that should be so. The presence of very little  antimatter in the Universe is a mystery to scientists.   

Did you know that a Banana produces a particle of antimatter every 75 minutes? Bananas contain a small amount of Potassium-40, an isotope of Potassium. When Potassium 40 decays, occasionally it spits out a positron. Our bodies also contain Potassium 40, so we also emit positrons. However these particles are very short lived and get annihilated.

Very less amount of antimatter has been artificially created by humans. That is only about some nanograms (nanogram is one billionth of a gram).

Just a small amount of antimatter can produce a huge amount of power (because it completely annihilates itself when it comes into contact with matter)  making it usable as fuel for space vehicles on lomg distance travel. Of course the challenge is to make that much antimatter, which is not yet possible for us. As mentioned above, humans have thus far produced only a few nanograms of antimatter.

ANTIMATTER IN MEDICINE:

PET(Positron Emission Tomography) uses positrons to produce high resolution images of the body. Positron emitting radioactive isotopes are attached to substances like Glucose. These are injected into the bloodstream where they release positrons that meet electrons in the body and annihilate. That produces gamma rays that are used to construct the images.

Scientists at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)  have studied antimatter as a potential candidate for cancer therapy. They discovered that they can target tumors with beams of particles that would release their energy only after passing through the healthy tissue. This technique was successful on a Hamster (a rodent like the rat but much smaller), but they have not yet tried it on humans.