Simulating Colliding Wormholes: What the Gravitational Wave Study Found (2026)

Physicists have now run the first full three-dimensional simulations of what happens when two wormholes collide — and the results are stranger than anyone expected. The study, posted as a preprint on October 9, 2026, models pairs of Ellis-Bronnikov wormholes crashing into each other and finds that the collisions produce gravitational waves with a signature completely different from black hole mergers: short, sharp bursts instead of the familiar “chirp.”

If the phrase “simulating colliding wormholes” caught your eye in the science news, here’s the plain-English version of what the researchers actually did, what they found, and why astronomers care.

First, what is a wormhole?

A wormhole is a tunnel through spacetime connecting two far-apart regions of the universe. It’s not science fiction — the idea falls out of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the bending of spacetime. In theory, spacetime can bend in such a way that two distant points get linked by a shortcut throat.

The type modeled in this study is called an Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole. It’s a traversable wormhole, meaning something could in principle travel through it. What holds the throat open is a hypothetical “phantom scalar field” — an exotic field with negative-energy properties that keeps the tunnel from pinching shut.

There’s a catch: these wormholes are unstable. Even a tiny disturbance can upset the balance. The throat can either collapse and form a black hole, or run away in the other direction and expand uncontrollably. So wormholes, if they exist at all, are fragile things.

The study behind the news

The simulations were run by Nikita M. Shirokov, a physicist at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and Ilya Nachevsky, an engineer at the Higher School of Economics in Russia. Their paper is titled Binary Ellis-Bronnikov wormholes in 3+1 numerical relativity: mergers, fly-bys and gravitational waves.

It’s posted on the arXiv preprint server (arXiv:2610.13206) and had not yet been peer-reviewed when science media covered it on October 17, 2026. According to the authors, these are the first 3D numerical-relativity simulations ever run of two interacting wormholes.

Shirokov had previously published a related study of a single collapsing wormhole earlier in 2026, but this new work is the first to put two wormholes together and watch what happens.

What the simulations showed

The researchers tried many setups — different starting distances, trajectories, and field strengths — and got a surprisingly mixed bag of outcomes.

Wormholes attract or repel, depending on their “charge”

Each wormhole carries a scalar-field charge. The simulations revealed a simple rule: like charges repel each other, while opposite charges attract. Only opposite-signed pairs actually merge. The measured attraction-to-repulsion ratio came out to about 1.46, very close to the theoretically predicted 3/2. So not every encounter ends in a collision — some wormholes just push each other away.

Head-on collisions make a shrinking black hole

When two wormholes with opposite charges plunged straight at each other, something genuinely weird happened. Instead of merging into one big wormhole, a common apparent horizon — similar to a black hole’s event horizon — formed around both still-open throats, swallowing them together.

Then the horizon did something black hole horizons aren’t supposed to do: it shrank. As the phantom scalar field fell into the collapsing region, the horizon lost about 28 percent of its area. That’s striking because Stephen Hawking’s area theorem from 1971 says a black hole’s horizon area can only grow, never shrink.

So why isn’t this a contradiction? Two reasons. First, the area theorem assumes certain rules about how energy behaves — rules the phantom field violates with its negative-energy properties. Second, the simulation produced an apparent horizon, not a true event horizon. Still, it’s a result nobody had seen before.

Fly-bys: no collision, but big fireworks

Not every pair merged. Some wormholes grazed past each other and flew apart, with both throats expanding dramatically. Remarkably, one of these near-miss fly-bys produced the strongest gravitational-wave burst measured in the entire study — no collision needed.

The gravitational-wave signal: bursts, not chirps

This is the part astronomers care about most. When two black holes spiral toward each other, they produce a “chirp” — a signal that grows louder and higher in pitch as they close in. We’ve now detected well over a hundred gravitational-wave events, and most are black hole mergers making exactly that sound.

Wormhole encounters sound different. Every encounter in the simulations produced short, sharp bursts of gravitational waves — not chirps. The exact shape and strength depended on whether the wormholes plunged straight in or just grazed each other. And unlike black hole pairs, these wormhole binaries never settle into a gradual inspiral; the negative-energy field actually pumps energy into the orbit rather than draining it, so there’s no slow spiral at all.

Why does this matter?

Gravitational-wave astronomy is still young. Detectors like LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA keep picking up signals, and while nearly all match black hole or neutron star mergers, some events look odd. The most famous example is GW190521, detected in 2019 — an unusual signal that scientists have investigated as a possible hint of exotic physics.

To be clear: the new study does not connect wormholes to GW190521, and the authors make no such claim. A burst-like signal is not automatically evidence of wormholes — black holes can produce bursts under some conditions too. But the point of the study is that we now have, for the first time, a concrete picture of what a wormhole collision would actually sound like. If detectors ever record something like this, we’ll have a template to compare it against instead of guessing in the dark.

The big caveats

None of this means wormholes are real, or that anyone has detected one. A few important caveats:

• Wormholes are still hypothetical. No one has observed one. The whole study assumes Ellis-Bronnikov wormholes exist and behave as theory predicts.
• The paper isn’t peer-reviewed yet. It was posted to arXiv on October 9, 2026, and independent experts haven’t formally checked the results.
• Detectability is a long shot. The researchers note that if wormholes formed in the early universe, cosmic expansion would have stretched their signals to frequencies far below what LIGO or even the planned LISA space mission could detect. For the signals to be detectable, wormholes would have to form much later in cosmic history — and nobody knows how that could happen.

Even so, the study does something useful: it turns a vague “what if” into a specific, testable prediction. That’s how science moves forward — one simulation at a time.

FAQ

Can wormholes actually collide?

Only in simulations so far. Nobody knows whether wormholes exist in the real universe, so real collisions are purely hypothetical. The study shows what would happen if two Ellis-Bronnikov wormholes met, according to general relativity.

How are wormhole gravitational waves different from black hole ones?

Black hole mergers produce a rising “chirp” as they spiral in. Wormhole encounters produce short, sharp bursts — and the pairs don’t spiral in at all. The signal’s shape depends on whether the wormholes collide head-on or just fly past each other.

Did this study discover a real wormhole signal?

No. It produced computer predictions of what such a signal would look like. No known gravitational-wave detection has been linked to a wormhole collision.

What is an Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole?

A theoretically traversable wormhole held open by a phantom scalar field with negative-energy properties. It’s one of the best-studied wormhole models, but it remains hypothetical and is known to be unstable.