"This is a neat calculation showing that, if wormholes are out there, this would give us a fighting chance to see them," said Matt Visser, a theoretical physicist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand (also not involved in the study). "But wormholes are speculative stuff. A lot of work has been done with them, but primarily as a theoretical tool to stretch Einstein's ideas to their limits, to break them and see what drops out the other end."

Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen proposed the existence of wormholes in 1935, dubbing them Einstein-Rosen bridges. Decades later, the objects were mathematically shown to be unstable: Before even a piece of light could have a chance to fly through, the throat of the wormhole would close up for good.

More recent work by Michael Morris and Kip Thorne, however, suggests that highly exotic negative mass and energy - thought to behave counter to gravity - could prop open a wormhole's throat long enough for a courageous human to sneak through.

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