Cosmic Gong: How a Black Hole Rings a Wormhole ✦

Original: "Gravitational Waves from a Black Hole Falling Radially into a Thin-Shell Traversable Wormhole"

· Mohammad Nosherwan Malik, James B. Dent, William E. Gabella, Thomas W. Kephart

arXiv:2605.01216v1 · 2026-05-02 · CC BY · ⏱ 1 min · General Relativity HEP Phenomenology

A black hole falling into a traversable wormhole produces a gravitational-wave 'ringing'—a sequence of pulses and silences detectable by LIGO.

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A black hole falling into a wormhole behaves like a mallet striking an invisible cosmic gong. We hear gravitational waves only when it's on our side—and then dead silence follows. Such signals are already within LIGO's reach, turning 'Interstellar' from a dream into a real observational challenge.

🎯 The throat area of the wormhole exceeds the black hole's horizon area by a factor of 3600: it flies in there like a billiard ball into a giant pipe, and the repulsive exotic matter keeps the wormhole from collapsing.

🎬 The idea of a traversable wormhole was featured in the movie 'Interstellar' (with Kip Thorne as scientific consultant)—a journey through such a tunnel. The proposed signatures turn science fiction into observational science: now we can 'hear' a black hole plunging into a wormhole.

h_{ij}^{\text{TT}} = \frac{2G}{c^4 D} \frac{d^2 I_{ij}}{dt^2}

Here h_{ij}^{TT} is the deformation of spacetime in the transverse-traceless gauge, G is Newton's constant, c is the speed of light, D is the distance to the source, I_{ij} is the mass quadrupole moment.

\text{ASD}(f) = \sqrt{S_h(f)}

ASD(f) is the amplitude spectral density at frequency f, S_h(f) is the one-sided power spectral density of the detector noise.

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Cosmic Gong: How a Black Hole Rings a Wormhole ✦