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Space

Wormholes could blast out blazing hot plasma at incredible speeds

If matter falls into one end of a wormhole, it could heat up in a tornado of plasma hot enough to initiate nuclear fusion – and come blasting out the other end

By Leah Crane

31 May 2024

If traversable wormholes exist, we could potentially detect their plasma blasts

Rostislav Zatonskiy / Alamy

Wormholes that are surrounded by matter, like the ring that gathers around a black hole, could create strange rotating clouds of hot plasma. Anything that falls in one end could shoot out the other at 200 million kilometres per hour, or even faster if the wormhole is enormous.

A wormhole is a tunnel between two locations in space-time. The simplest versions of these hypothetical objects have black holes as “mouths” on either end of the throat connecting them – nothing can escape once it has…

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