Cosmic Hourglass: The Flickering Shadow of a Wormhole ✦

Original: "Dynamics and Radiative Signatures of Accretion Flows onto a Kerr-like Wormhole"

· Jing-ze Xia, Hong-xuan Jiang, Cheng Liu, Yosuke Mizuno

arXiv:2605.04631v1 · 2026-05-06 · CC BY · ⏱ 1 min · High Energy General Relativity HEP Theory

Wormholes trap plasma at the throat, creating a dual signature: an extra shadow branch and quasi-periodic flickering that reveals their nature.

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From the Galactic center comes a pulse: the wormhole, like a cosmic hourglass, traps plasma at its throat, and it oscillates, beating out a steady period. This is not accretion chaos—it's a spacetime metronome. The Event Horizon Telescope will catch this tick—and we'll realize: in the heart of the Milky Way lies not a voracious hole, but a passage to another universe.

🎯 The idea of a wormhole as a bridge between universes was born with Ludwig Flamm in 1916—just a year after general relativity was published. Back then it seemed a mathematical curiosity, and now we hunt for its shadow.

🎬 In the film Interstellar, a wormhole appears as a sphere granting instant travel to another galaxy. Its consultants relied on actual equations, but today's simulations add a new twist: the throat of such a wormhole would collect searing plasma, and its shadow would itself become a storyteller of spacetime's hidden geometry.

ds^2 = -\!\left(1 - \frac{2M}{\sqrt{r^2+\ell^2}}\right) dt^2 + \left(1 - \frac{2M}{\sqrt{r^2+\ell^2}}\right)^{-1} dr^2 + r^2 d\Omega^2

Metric of a static wormhole with throat parameter ℓ. Unlike a black hole, there is no horizon—at r=0, space does not collapse but transitions to the other mouth.

P \approx 2\pi \sqrt{\frac{r^3}{GM}}

Approximate period of orbital motion for plasma at radius r (near the throat). For r on the order of a few gravitational radii, this yields minutes to hours for supermassive objects, matching the quasi-periodic oscillations in the simulations.

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Cosmic Hourglass: The Flickering Shadow of a Wormhole ✦