• Question: whats the difference between a wormhole and a black hole and how are they formed?

    Asked by pratiksha21 to Alex, Jools, Lynz, Matt, Rika on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Matthew Dickinson

      Matthew Dickinson answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      This was better than the answer that I was going to give:
      Black holes are the result of massive stars collapsing in on themselves and basically falling out of our universe. They compress to such a tiny area its called a singularity. The only thing left of them is their gravity, which is so strong that once you get past a certain point (called the event horizon) there is no turning back. Not even light can exit the event horizon. Black holes were originally theoretical items, but now astronomers are fairly certain they have id’d several in reality.

      Worm holes are still theorectical / fictional. They would be tears in 2 locations of our universe with a ‘tunnel’ of sorts between them. If the wormhole was large enough, you would be able to go from one end to the other through the tunnel, bypassing all the distance in between.

    • Photo: Julie Greensmith

      Julie Greensmith answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      If you think of space like a running track and you want to get from one corner to the other, the normal way would be to walk around the track until you get to the other side. The theory of wormholes is that there is a shortcut between the two points in space so that you could cut between the corners by walking across the middle of the track. Wormholes were invented by scientists who think that space and time are not straight lines.

      A black hole is as Matt explained, a really really dense point called a singularity when something has so much mass, it collapses in on itself. The gravitational pull is so massive from all that mass that everything gets sucked in including light.

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