Black Holes vs. Wormholes: One Is Confirmed, the Other Isn't
Black Holes vs. Wormholes: One Is Confirmed, the Other Isn't
On this blog, I keep coming back to Interstellar. The movie earns it. There's enough real science packed into it to keep the conversation going for years.
Most of that discussion circles the black hole, Gargantua. The wormhole barely gets a mention, which always struck me as backward. It's the one piece almost no science-fiction story can do without.
One of These Has Been Photographed. The Other Hasn't.
Point a global network of radio dishes at the center of our galaxy and you get a picture. Point the same tools at a wormhole and you get nothing — not because nobody looked, but because there was never anything there to catch.
The core difference between a black hole and a wormhole is simple: one has been observed directly, the other has not. In 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. No wormhole has ever been detected in nature.
That image isn't a snapshot of the black hole itself. It can't be, since no light escapes one. What the telescope array actually caught was the glow of superheated plasma bent around the black hole, forming a bright ring around a dark shadow with the event horizon hidden inside.
Stars near the galaxy's center had already hinted at an invisible mass there for decades. What 2022 added wasn't proof the object existed. It was a face to put on it. A wormhole has never had that.
Sagittarius A* has a photograph. No wormhole does.
A 1935 Equation Nobody Meant as a Travel Guide
Blame Einstein for the shortcut everyone imagines, and blame him unfairly. In 1935, working with physicist Nathan Rosen, he found that the equations of general relativity allowed two separate regions of spacetime to be stitched together at a single point.
The paper wasn't about travel. Einstein and Rosen were trying to describe particles as geometric features of space itself, and the bridge fell out of the math as a side effect. Physicist John Wheeler gave it its now-familiar name, "wormhole," in 1957, and pop culture ran further than the original paper ever intended.
In its classical form, though, the Einstein-Rosen bridge was never a structure anything could cross. The geometry pinches shut before anything gets through, a different behavior entirely from the stable, crossable version science fiction borrowed the name for.
Two decades earlier, in 1916, Karl Schwarzschild had already solved Einstein's field equations for a non-rotating mass. The result was the boundary later called the event horizon, the mathematical seed on the black hole side of this comparison.
It's hard not to notice the asymmetry already forming. Schwarzschild's solution eventually got a name, a shape, and in 2019 an image of its shadow. Einstein and Rosen's bridge got a name, a shape, and more than eighty years of waiting.
The Toll Physics Charges for a Passable Tunnel
Say you wanted the wormhole to actually be a door, not just a diagram. Physics will let you build one, for a price.
In 1988, physicists Michael Morris and Kip Thorne worked out what a traversable wormhole would require. The throat has to stay open, and to keep it open, the model needs matter with negative energy density. The paper's own term for it is "exotic matter."
That's not a wish list. It's a mathematical condition for the geometry not to collapse the instant something tries to pass through.
It's easy to make that sound like a loophole. It isn't one. It's the requirement working exactly as intended, refusing to hand over a stable tunnel without something real to hold it open.
It's the same kind of question that comes up when people argue over how many holes a drinking straw actually has — a matter of what geometry allows in principle, long before anyone checks it against the physical world.
What a Quantum Computer Did (and Didn't) Do to a Wormhole
The last five years didn't narrow the gap between these two objects. They widened it.
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope produced the very first picture of a black hole's shadow, M87*. In 2022, it followed with Sagittarius A*, our own galaxy's center.
In 2015, LIGO detected the first confirmed gravitational-wave signal, GW150914, matching the signature of two merging black holes. The finding was announced the following year, and Virgo joined the detector network soon after. That's another independent way of confirming these are real, no photograph required.
Then, in 2022, a paper in Nature reported something that made headlines read "Scientists Create a Wormhole." They hadn't. Researchers ran a simplified quantum simulation, a toy version of wormhole dynamics, on a quantum processor. It's a real result in quantum information theory, not a hole in spacetime, and the paper never claimed otherwise.
Maybe the more honest way to read 2022 is this: it was the year one side of this comparison got a portrait, and the other side got a headline that overstated what its own data showed.
The Names Missing From the Black Hole Story
The names attached to this story tend to be the same four or five: Einstein, Schwarzschild, Wheeler, Hawking. The foundation under them is wider than that.
In 1925, astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's doctoral thesis established that stars are made overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium, a finding that underlies the stellar physics black holes eventually form from.
Decades later, astronomer Andrea Ghez led a team that tracked the orbits of stars near the Milky Way's center for years, building the case that an enormous, compact mass sat right where those orbits pointed. Ghez shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for that work.
None of this reaches into wormhole research directly, and the record doesn't support stretching it that far. What it does show is that the observational case for black holes was built by more hands than the popular telling usually credits.
| Aspect | Black Hole | Wormhole |
|---|---|---|
| Direct observation | Imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope (2019, 2022) | None on record |
| First proposed | Schwarzschild, 1916 | Einstein and Rosen, 1935 |
| Physical requirement | Follows from ordinary matter collapsing under gravity | Needs exotic, negative-energy matter to stay open |
| Independent confirmation | Gravitational waves, LIGO/Virgo, 2016 | None |
| Current status | Established astrophysical object | Theoretical solution, unconfirmed in nature |
The Compressed Version
Nearly every science-fiction story that uses a wormhole starts there and ends there too. It's both the way in and the way out. That alone says something: the wormhole isn't only a plot device borrowed for convenience.
It falls directly out of solving Einstein's equations, a genuine solution inside general relativity that theoretical physics has treated as real for ninety years. Given that the math keeps producing it, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume something like it exists somewhere.
What tips it further, for me, is scale. Our own galaxy alone holds more planetary systems resembling our solar system than anyone can count. Which suggests a universe that repeats its patterns stubbornly, not one that tries an idea only once.
If shortcuts through spacetime are possible at all, a universe this repetitive seems like the kind of place where they'd show up more than once. That's not proof. It's a guess, and I know it.
But it sits right at the edge between what science fiction imagined and what the math actually allows.
Frequently asked questions
Is a black hole the same thing as a wormhole?
No. A black hole is a region of spacetime with a boundary light can't escape, and it has been directly observed. A wormhole is a theoretical structure connecting two regions of spacetime that has never been detected in nature.
Has a wormhole ever been photographed?
No wormhole has ever been photographed or otherwise detected. By contrast, black holes have been imaged twice by the Event Horizon Telescope, in 2019 (M87*) and 2022 (Sagittarius A*).
Why did the black hole image show a ring instead of a black circle?
The Event Horizon Telescope image shows superheated plasma glowing as it bends around the black hole's edge, not the black hole itself, since no light escapes one. The bright ring is that bent light and hot gas, framing the dark shadow where the event horizon sits.
What would it take to keep a wormhole open?
Physicists Michael Morris and Kip Thorne calculated in 1988 that a traversable wormhole's throat would need matter with negative energy density, often called exotic matter, to stay open. No evidence exists of that kind of matter assembled at the scale or stability a wormhole would need, and no stable wormhole has ever been found in nature.
Did scientists create a wormhole with a quantum computer in 2022?
No. A 2022 study in Nature ran a simplified quantum model of wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor. It was a result in quantum information theory, not the creation or detection of a wormhole in spacetime.
Who first came up with the idea of a wormhole?
Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen described the mathematical structure in 1935, now called the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Physicist John Wheeler coined the term "wormhole" in 1957.
Could a black hole actually be a wormhole to another universe?
No. The idea that a black hole's interior connects through to a wormhole and exits through a "white hole" in another universe comes from mathematical extensions of general relativity mixed with science fiction, not from observation. Current physics doesn't support treating an astrophysical black hole as a functioning wormhole entrance.
Sources & References
- Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, "First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results," 2022 (eventhorizontelescope.org)
- Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, first M87* results, 2019
- NASA, "What Is a Black Hole?" 2024
- Schwarzschild, "On the Gravitational Field of a Mass Point According to Einstein's Theory," 1916
- Einstein and Rosen, "The Particle Problem in the General Theory of Relativity," Physical Review, 1935
- Wheeler, Annals of Physics, 1957
- Morris and Thorne, "Wormholes in Spacetime and Their Use for Interstellar Travel," American Journal of Physics, 1988
- LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration, "Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger," Physical Review Letters, 2016 (virgo-gw.eu)
- Jafferis et al., "Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor," Nature, 2022 (nature.com)
- Payne-Gaposchkin, Stellar Atmospheres, 1925
- Ghez et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 2008
- The Nobel Prize, "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020," 2020 (nobelprize.org)
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