Have We Finally Found a Real Wormhole?

On 21st May 2019, we captured a strange pulse  coming from the other side of the Universe. A gravitational wave a fraction  of a diameter of a proton, that had traveled more than 17  billion light years to reach us.

Usually, signals of this magnitude  are caused by black hole mergers, but there was something a  little off about this wave.

It didn’t look like other black  hole mergers we were used to. It was too short and missing half of the waveform.

This signal bamboozled the  scientific community until, in 2025, a team proposed an explanation so wild, it  sent theoretical physicists into a frenzy.

What if this signal wasn’t  produced in our Universe at all? What if it had travelled through a  wormhole from a parallel universe?

I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Join me today as we break  down the physics of wormholes, untangle the mind-bending relationship between  quantum entanglement and spacetime geometry, and examine whether we really eavesdropped  on an echo from another universe.

When the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave  Observatory (or LIGO) detected the signal of gravitational wave GW190521, researchers  realised something exhilarating. If their interpretation of the colliding black  holes’ size and mass was correct,

they’d just made the first detection of an  intermediate-mass black hole in human history. I’ve made another video about these types of  black holes before that you can watch here.

You see, until then, we had only  observed stellar mass black holes, any black hole under 65 solar  masses, and supermassive black holes, black holes measuring hundreds of thousands  to billions of times the mass of our Sun.

The maths says there should be a third  category - intermediate-mass black holes, measuring about 100 to 100,000 times the mass of our Sun and computer simulations agree.  But we’d never seen one directly - until this gravitational wave floated across our  radars hinting that one might be out there.

This signal seemed to be an echo of two black  holes colliding - one measuring 85 solar masses, and the other 66. They merged to form a  larger black hole 142 times the mass of our Sun - and if you’re doing the  maths here, yes that means nine

full sun’s worth of mass were instantly  converted into pure gravitational energy. As if this weren’t exciting enough, in 2025,  a research team led by Qi Lai at the Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of  Chinese Academy of Sciences took a closer look