Passageways to Alien Worlds May Be Hiding in Plain Sight

 In 1964, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory launched a rocket mission into space to search the universe for X-rays. At the time, X-ray astronomy was a new field. Researchers suspected there were high-energy objects in space -- supernovas or neutron stars -- that could be "seen" by the X-rays they emit. But X-ray detectors on Earth didn't work on these distant objects for good reason: the Earth's atmosphere absorbs X-rays from space. If it didn't, we'd be bombarded with radiation, damaging our DNA and leading to unthinkable mutations and ugly deaths.

Scientists at the NRL went the suborbital route, sending a rocket with a geiger counter past Earth's atmosphere and into the void of space. They would soon find out if the Milky Way included anything emitting high-energy electromagnetic radiation.

The NRL's "Aerobee" 150 rocket launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and successfully cleared Earth's atmosphere. And its instruments went crazy. Researchers made history, confirming for the first time there were objects in the universe giving off X-rays. But there was something more: one object out there had a staggering amount of X-ray emissions, beyond anything they were expecting. It was in the Cygnus constellation, and it was invisible to observatories on Earth that relied on visible light. They called the invisible object Cygnus X-1. And whatever it was, it emitted radiation like it was a factory heating endless streams of material to millions of degrees.

It took seven more years of study until astronomers confirmed what they'd found. Cygnus X-1 was a black hole -- an object so dense its gravity allows nothing to escape. Not even light. How dense? Imagine the mass of the sun, 800,000 miles wide, packed into a sphere 60 miles wide. At its center, all that mass is concentrated into "the Singularity". You know the term if you're a fan of the movie Interstellar. It's the point where all matter is squished into what Scientists call infinite density, or zero volume. Not destroyed, but forever trapped. At least that's the theory.

It's not just any theory, of course. The behaviors of a black hole are based on Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which he gave to the world in 1915 -- decades before a black hole was discovered. And his predictions on gravity's behavior have been confirmed through indirect observations of gravitational waves and X-ray emissions.

But a recently published report suggests Einstein may be completely wrong. At least about this one thing.

It's understandable. He missed out on an entire field of study called Quantum Mechanics. It's the theory of physics that governs how particles behave at microscopic levels, where the normal rules of physics don't necessarily apply. Quantum mechanics says matter can not simply be squished to zero mass. It must remain finite and describable. Einstein's theory breaks down when it comes to explaining microscopic behaviors.

At the quantum level, something much different may be happening inside Cygnus X-1.

The new study, by two physicists, is titled "Black Hole Singularity Resolution in Unimodular Gravity from Unitarity". Not the most thrilling title. But it introduces a thrilling idea. If matter isn't forever trapped in a black hole, it must be going somewhere else. The paper proposes that at the other end of a black hole sucking everything in, is a white hole acting in reverse, ejecting matter and energy back into the universe. And the authors, Steffen Gielen from the University of Sheffield and Lucía Menéndez-Pidal from the University of Madrid, present a mathematical framework that supports the theory.

In other words, they've got numbers to back up the idea that there may be another end to the black hole.

Of course, Einstein thought of this already. In 1935 he came up with the theory that there could be a passage through space-time connecting distant parts of the universe - or even different universes. He called it a wormhole. If they existed, they would allow for faster-than-light travel between two locations. They could explain how all these UAP's end up flying around in our skies. But wormholes don't exist -- they've never been observed.

With this new quantum-level understanding of black holes, which says there must be another side, it could be we've just discovered these interstellar wormholes have been there the whole time. 

Since the discovery of Cygnus X-1, we've identified thousands of black holes in the universe.

It could be we've been looking at interstellar off-ramps this whole time and didn't even know it.