Reading: Scientists think we received a mysterious signal through a wormhole

Scientists think we received a mysterious signal through a wormhole

Last updated: 2025/10/07 at 12:52 PM

News Room Published 7 October 2025

The space around Earth is buzzing with signals, but in 2019 something strange happened. Gravitational wave detectors on Earth picked up a signal that left scientists puzzled. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space and time, usually created when massive, dense objects like black holes collide. Now, researchers think this strange signal could be evidence of a wormhole (Picture: Getty)

In a new paper, the researchers think that the strange gravitational signal, known as GW190521, may have come from another universe. GW190521 rippled across the Earth on May 21, 2019. Usually, the merger to two massive objects spiraling closer and closer together create ripples in space-time, as well as a ‘chirp’ which looks like a rising waveform (Picture: Getty)

But GW190521 did not have that little chirp, known as the “inspiral” part of the signal. As the resulting object was roughly 142 times the mass of the sun, scientists should have been able to detect this part of the signal if it occurred using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The LIGO is an instrument that detected the first gravitational wave in 2015. So now researchers are wondering how else the black holes could have merged (Picture: Getty)

One idea is that the black holes were caught in a mutual gravity well, essentially allowing them to skip the inspiral signal typically associated with black hole mergers. Another idea is that the black holes merged in an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), which could help explain this massive binary system with current astrophysical models, but these researchers proposed a wormhole (Picture: Getty)

They wrote in their paper: ‘The ringdown signal after binary black holes (BBHs) merged in another universe can pass through the throat of a wormhole and be detected in our universe as a short-duration echo pulse. We hypothesise that GW190521 might represent a single, isolated gravitational wave (GW) echo pulse from the wormhole, which is the post-merger remnant of BBHs in another universe and connected to our universe through a throat’ (Picture: Getty)

As wormholes would only be open for a short time, which would explain why GW190521 seemed to cut off abruptly. And although their modelling suggests this scenario isn’t very likely, Dr Qi Lai of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study, says evidence cannot rule out that the signal travelled to Earth from another universe. The team created a mathematical model of what this wormhole signal would look like and compared it to the data from the real GW190521 signal captured by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors (Picture: Getty)

The researchers also created a model for a sudden collision in our own universe – and they compared the results. And the standard collision model did fit the data better, making the wormhole model still a good explanation for the GW190521 collision. If this is true, this would not only prove that wormholes exist but also give scientists a powerful new tool to study them, and it could give us a glimpse into a universe beyond our own (Picture: Getty)

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