 
THE STARGATE WORMHOLE
Each week we dial in to watch our team go through the Stargate to other planets. As Samantha Carter explains it, the Stargate is a giant superconductor that makes a conduit from our gate to another gate some place else. In Season Two's "A Matter of Time," she explains to Colonel O'Neill that it's like burrowing your way through an apple instead of traveling around the outside of it.
Sounds like a mouthful. And there are no actual worms.
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Wormholes are theoretically real -- but travel through one is probably impossible. |
For the past nine seasons, viewers have studied "Gate Travel 101." The Stargate converts matter into energy and then transmits it through the wormhole and reconstructs it. In Season Nine's "Ripple Effect," Sam calculates that the trip takes 0.3 seconds. And as fast as you enter the gate is as fast as you come out, according to Season Four's "Divide and Conquer."
If you've ever wanted to say, "Dial it up, Daniel," as Colonel Jack O'Neill has ordered many times, you may have to wait. N.A.S.A. scientists say that wormholes are theoretically possible, but no one has ever seen one. In fact, scientists say a whole bunch of problems make it fairly certain that traveling through a wormhole can't happen ... no matter what Sam Carter tells us.
The amount of energy required to make a black hole is too enormous. Think about the energy within a sun. How would anyone ever reproduce that much?
A wormhole is really a black hole with an entrance, a tunnel, and an exit, called a white hole. Wormholes are conjectured tunnels that bypass normal space-time to link isolated spots in the universe. A black hole forms at the end of the life of very massive stars. The resulting black hole usually has only the entrance. Once something is inside a black hole, it never comes back out. That means you!
Henry Boyd and his team are trapped on a planet near a black hole, which slows down time and prevents them from dialing home. From "A Matter of Time" | |
In Season One's "Singularity," an eclipse on Cassandra's planet provides the opportunity to view a black hole in action. Carter explains that you can't actually see a black hole, but you can see light and matter falling into it. Colonel O'Neill explains the part viewed is called the "accretion disk." He goes on to explain to Teal'c that a black hole just sucks everything in, light, everything. (After all, Jack doesn't have a telescope on his roof just to look at the neighbors.)
To make a black hole into a wormhole, we would need special materials not found in reality. Otherwise it collapses almost instantly to an isolated black hole. The exotic material required to hold the tunnel open must have negative energy density, something not known in reality.
Then there is the contradiction of the "Grandfather Paradox." If wormholes were possible and the flow of information (or matter) through them were possible, you quickly get into time-travel contradictions, such as the "grandfather paradox," wherein a time traveler could kill his own grandfather, preventing his very existence.
Most physicists believe that the laws of physics do not allow this kind of time travel, which casts serious doubt on any kind of sustained wormhole.
And most importantly, information cannot really pass through. You might go through but you wouldn't come back out. Maybe a couple of your atoms would, but not you. It's fun to imagine wormhole travel, anyway.
Even getting near an event horizon of the Stargate is a problem. In "A Matter Of Time" the gate connects to P3W-451, the black hole planet. Gravity from the black hole starts to suck in everything in the Gate Room ... including time. "Tidal forces" are mentioned several times on the show. The M.A.L.P. sends back images of the frightened SG team on the planet. Carter explains they will die by being pulled apart by tidal forces.
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Sam and Teal'c take a ship to locate the Asgard, but find that they have created a black hole to try and destroy the Replicators. From "New Order, Part 1" |
The same is true in Season Eight's "New Order," when Sam and Teal'c take a cargo ship to the Asgard homeworld of Halla. The closer you get to the event horizon, the greater the push and pull of gravity. The tug of gravity on the ship in the front will be much greater than in the back. The ship begins to stretch and gets torn apart. This stretching is the tidal force. But N.A.S.A. and Caltech physicists say these tidal forces would be so strong at the Stargate's event horizon, it's doubtful anyone would survive.
Outside of the event horizon, a black hole isn't as devastating as it sounds. The force of gravity falls off quickly, as an inverse square of the distance. In the center of our galaxy we believe there is a massive black hole, but even the stars quite close to it are not falling in or being torn apart. They are just orbiting it and have been orbiting for many, many years. We live very far away from the center of the galaxy, in a spiral arm, and we are in no danger at all of getting close to the edge of the Milky Way's black hole.
In January, 2006, N.A.S.A.'s Chandra Observatory revealed a startling find. The Chandra project has discovered that black holes are extremely common in the universe, much more than we believed. A dense swarm of 10,000 or more stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars has formed around Sagittarius A (SGR A). The swarm likely formed as stellar-mass black holes gradually decelerated in their orbits and sank toward the center of the galaxy.
Modern observation has revealed the existence of thousands of black holes in our galaxy. | |
Black holes orbiting the center of the galaxy at a distance of several light years will pull on surrounding stars, which pull back on the black holes. The net effect of this gravitational action and reaction is to decelerate the black holes -- which have masses of about 10 suns -- and speed up the lower-mass surrounding stars. The push and pull keeps us from falling in.
Gravity, tidal forces, imaginary materials, time travel paradoxes, and the enormous amount of energy necessary to make a wormhole are all reasons why a Stargate probably will never really exist. But we can tune in each week to imagine and hope science will some day find a way.
RELATED LINKS:
Chandra X-ray Observatory (N.A.S.A.)
Chandra X-ray Observatory Photos
Chandra X-ray Observatory (Harvard)
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