A wormhole collides with a black hole -- what would happen?

[Brianok]

TL;DR Summary

A wormhole collides with a black hole

A wormhole collides with a black hole------------what would happen?

 

[phinds]

What do you think and why?

 

[fresh_42]

Summary: A wormhole collides with a black hole

A wormhole collides with a black hole------------what would happen?

A wormhole is a mathematical construct, so nobody can tell what nature would do. I recently heard from the physicist that wormholes are unstable as soon as matter falls in, and a black hole is a large amount of matter, or at least mass. So according to this scientists, the wormhole would collapse and the black hole would remain.

 

[Torbert]

I understood wormholes to be a function of black holes rather than being separate entities. Now I got to go do some reading.
If my recollections are correct, if a wormhole with a black hole at each end met another black hole then the wormhole would either collapse or reform with one end intact and the other connected with the new larger black hole.
The reform part sounds sketchy, requiring that above mentioned reading.

 

[PeterDonis]

I understood wormholes to be a function of black holes rather than being separate entities.

There is a particular kind of wormhole, sometimes called an "Einstein-Rosen bridge", that occurs in the maximally extended Schwarzschild spacetime, which describes an "eternal" black hole that doesn't form from the collapse of a massive object but exists infinitely into both the past and the future. Obviously this solution is not physically reasonable, but it exists mathematically.

However, there are plenty of other wormhole solutions (the simplest is the one published in the late 1980s by Thorne, Morris, and Yurtsever) which have nothing to do with black holes.

If my recollections are correct, if a wormhole with a black hole at each end met another black hole then the wormhole would either collapse or reform with one end intact and the other connected with the new larger black hole.

This is not what happens with the Einstein-Rosen bridge referred to above. In that spacetime, there are two exterior universes that start out separate, with a white hole in between them. Then they get connected by a wormhole that starts at zero size, grows to some maximum size that depends on the mass of the white hole, and then shrinks back to zero again and disappears, leaving the two exterior universes separate again. During this process the white hole turns into a black hole. The wormhole disappears so fast that nothing can travel through it; anything that tries to ends up inside the black hole.