

Here we see an artist's illustration of an event horizon. But instead of falling in and finding it impossible to escape, with a white hole a person could never reach the event horizon from the outside, because it's constantly flinging its contents out into the universe faster than the speed of light.Ĭonnecting the paired singularities of a black hole and a white hole together forms the simplest kind of wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge. A white hole still has a singularity at its center and an event horizon surrounding it. While black holes were once considered just a trick of Einstein's equations, astronomical observations eventually revealed that black holes do exist in the universe.īut that same mathematics also allows for the exact reverse of a black hole: a white hole. Once someone crosses their boundaries, known as event horizons, they can't ever escape. Those equations showed that if you crunch down enough matter into a small enough volume, then gravity overwhelms every other force and shrinks the matter down into an infinitely tiny point, known as the singularity.īlack holes are one-way trips. Scientists first discovered black holes not through observations in the universe, but through the mathematics of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Some physicists predict that a wormhole could become more stable if it was formed from a spinning black hole, but our understanding of what happens in that scenario is murky at best.
