Sensitive searches for wormholes
John H. Simonetti, Michael J. Kavic, Djordje Minic, Dejan Stojkovic, De-Chang Dai
Abstract
A sensitive test for whether a black hole is a wormhole, using astronomical observations, would be to look for perturbations in the orbit of a pulsar around the black hole, caused by a perturbing object on the other side of the wormhole. By observing a pulsar in an orbit like that of S2 around the supermassive black hole at Sgr A* at the center of our Galaxy, the attainable mass limit on the perturber would be approximately ${10}^{4}$ times better than derived from current observations of S2. For a nominal stellar-mass black hole--pulsar binary, observing for 1 year could set a mass limit on a perturber more than 6 orders of magnitude better than for a pulsar orbiting Sgr A*. Observations of a star in a stellar-mass binary containing a black hole could set limits similar to the case of a pulsar orbiting Sgr A*.