Scientists just made a wormhole to learn more about traversing space and time

Wormholes are an intriguing bit that most people probably chalk up to science fiction. After all, seeing the Millennium Falcon barreling through hyperspeed in Star Wars is exciting, but there’s no way we could ever actually travel like that, right? Well, it might not actually be that impossible. According to new research, scientists were able to make a man-made wormhole using a quantum processor.

Of course, this isn’t to be misconstrued. They didn’t actually make a wormhole that someone was able to rip through space and time. Instead, they made a small, crummy wormhole on a quantum processor that could help teach us more about traversable wormhole dynamics. As such, the man-made wormhole, even if crummy, could be home to a plethora of data.

The physicists shared a paper detailing their findings on the man-made wormhole in the journal Nature. According to that paper, the “baby wormhole” was a successful attempt at observing traversable wormhole dynamics, something physicists have been trying to understand for decades. And, with scientists recently discovering a way to find wormholes in space, it could be more important than ever.

Because the wormhole was technically made using a quantum processor, the researchers have begun calling it an “emergent black hole.” That’s because it was more of a simulation than a physical entity like the stellar black holes astronomers continue to observe in our universe. There was no physical marker. Instead, the man-made wormhole was just a simulation.

Had the simulation managed to make a real-world wormhole, then it would be no different than saying that drawing a wormhole on a piece of paper created one, Scott Aaronson, a quantum computer expert, told The New York Times. Whether or not mankind could actually make a wormhole is another question altogether, though. And if we did, would the man-made wormhole act as other wormholes do?

The answer here is impossible to say for sure because we don’t yet have the technology to physically make a wormhole.