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Usually, a wormhole is imagined as a tunnel in space, whose walls are held open by something unusual — matter with negative energy. Like the supports in a mine that keep the ceiling from collapsing. But in this work, the physicists did without supports. They took three different empty spaces (what remains if you remove all stars and planets) and reshaped their coordinates, like a tailor altering a suit without adding new fabric. The result was three wormholes: one with a flat throat, like a straight corridor, and two with a spherical throat, like a round arch.

These wormholes are not just geometric tricks. One of them behaves like a purely topological construction, like a Möbius strip, which has no distinguished side. The other two create real gravity, even though they contain no matter. But the most surprising thing is that you cannot smoothly transform an ordinary wormhole with exotic matter into such an empty one. It's like trying to convert an arch bridge into a suspension bridge without dismantling the structure: they are fundamentally different.

It turns out that empty wormholes are not a simplified version of ordinary ones but a separate class of objects. They live in a distinct sector of 'configuration space'—an imaginary catalog of all possible geometries of the universe. And they open a new perspective on how space can connect distant regions without any magic.