Our Wormholes Are Different

A Lorentzian wormhole topology held open by exotic matter with negative energy density. Or something.

In reality, wormholes are purely a scientific conjecture, a consequence of the same equations that describe black holes. There's no way that we can conceive of to get to one or use it for anything. In fiction, however, wormholes are a Swirly Energy Thingy that can be used as a convenient means of travel from one place to another.

The most common use is for FTL Travel. By extension, if they show up often enough and consistently enough, they can become nodes in an interstellar Portal Network. They can also enable Time Travel, provide a mechanism for Subspace Ansible, act as doorways to Alternate Universes, or any/all of the above. No matter what Technobabble is thrown around, rarely will any two authors treat them in precisely the same manner, which is why Our Wormholes Are Different.

Related to Negative Space Wedgie. Compare: Our Time Travel Is Different, which this may sometimes overlap. See also Swirly Energy Thingy. Compare Unrealistic Black Hole. Often explained in Layman's Terms via Fold the Page, Fold the Space. See Powered by a Black Hole for a relatively more realistic way a black hole can be used.

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Examples:

Wormholes

Anime and Manga

• In Astra Lost in Space, wormholes are maybe twice a person's height and can chase people. They were created to help with a mass exodus from the earth.
• Interstella 5555: One connects The Crescendolls' galaxy to our moon. It's rhombus shaped, looking like a white version of the Phantom-Zone Picture in the Superman movies. The interior is an Acid-Trip Dimension full of large objects that can damage spaceships. Both ends disappear after The Cresendolls use it to get home at the end of the movie.
• Planet Remina from Remina came from Another Dimension through a wormhole. And considering what the planet is...
• In Space☆Dandy, wormholes are strange distortions in space that lead out of the existing universe. It's also mentioned that the primary difference between a wormhole and a black hole is that a wormhole has an exit.

Comic Books

• Green Lantern: The Green Lantern power rings can open wormholes that have been set up by the Guardians of The Universe.
  • When Hal Jordan returns to Earth from the other side of the galaxy in The Dark Knight Strikes Again, he mentions that the wormhole was still where he left it. Implying that Green Lanterns can create or move wormholes.
• In a crossover between Lobo and The Mask, Lobo is hired to track a criminal who destroyed several planets. He gets sucked through a wormhole and destroys various planets after finding an insulting drawing of himself. He finds out in the end that the wormhole sent him a month back in time and he had been hired to arrest himself.
• The Great Portal from Planet Hulk opens and closes randomly. One end always appears within orbit of the planet Sakaar while the other end opens at random points in the universe and sucks things in. Any technology that passes through gets irreparably damaged while living creatures get weakened for the next few days.
• In The Phantom Affair (an arc in X-Wing Rogue Squadron), a superweapon known as the gravitic polarizing device made the enemy ships and a portion of the asteroid belt ringing a planet simply disappear, with one of the startled pilots saying that it looked like a wormhole had opened up.
• A prequel comic to the first Transformers movie had the Alkaris Anomaly near Cybertron. Optimus Prime launches the AllSpark into it with Megatron following. It's specified to have one entrance and an infinite number of exits. It dumps the AllSpark on Earth and Megatron in a distant galaxy.
• Superman
  • The pre-crisis comics said that the warp-drive on the rocket that Superman used to get to Earth created a "space warp" between Krypton and Earth to Hand Wave why so many kryptonian survivors, objects and meteors ended up on Earth.
  • Superman: Birthright: Lex Luthor developed a kryptonite powered wormhole that allowed him to see into Krypton's past and eventually communicate with the natives.
  • Bronze age foe Terra-Man rode a Pegasus (actually an Arguvian space steed) named Nova who had the ability to open wormholes; allowing near-instantaneous interstellar travel.
• Wonder Woman: At the tail end of the Golden Age of Comics the Amazons were revealed to have a small space worthy fleet which traveled by opening temporary portals to points far outside the Earth's atmosphere, and back again. This allowed Wondy to have back-up when fighting oppressive aliens on their home turf.

Films — Live-Action

• In Contact, Dr. Arroway theorizes that the the alien machine transports its subject via an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
• Donnie Darko involves one that loops through time, maybe possibly.
• Flash Gordon: The "Imperial Vortex" that Dr Zarkov's ship flies through to reach the planet Mongo.
• In Interstellar, Cooper finds out that NASA detected an artificial wormhole near Saturn decades prior and has sent a dozen manned missions through it to map out the space on the other side and determine the habitability of the planets there. This version appears as a sphere (when Cooper points out that he expected something different, the onboard physicist explains that the wormhole is a projection of multi-dimensional space on our limited three-dimensional perception. He even provides the classic example of folding a piece of paper and puncturing it with a pencil, explaining that a hole in three dimensions is a sphere). Visually, the wormhole appears to distort space around it, and the other galaxy can be seen through it. Apparently, the wormhole has multiple destinations, as it's mentioned that twelve planets have been discovered on the other side, while only three are present in the chosen system. Presumably, other destinations are reached by entering the wormhole at a different vector.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Bifröst bridge in Thor is actually a traversable Einstein-Rosen Bridge (read: wormhole) appearing as a beam of light shooting to and from the sky. The myth of it being a rainbow bridge is due to the fact that it causes atmospheric disturbances as it opens up on Earth. It also comes with a light show. Apparently, if you keep it open longer than a few seconds, it can act as a Wave-Motion Gun and destroy an entire planet... Which makes a lot more sense when one considers the ludicrous energies required to make one of these things work in Real Life.
  • The portal created by the Tesseract/Cosmic Cube in The Avengers is a bit more conventional than the above, but no less spectacular: a circular doorway in the sky to wherever it is that the Chitauri come from, spewing out aliens and monsters to attack New York.
• The Mi-Go portal from Yuggoth (Pluto) to Earth in the 2011 adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness seems to be mystical in nature, rather than technological. An elaborate ritual is required to open it, along with, you guessed it, Human Sacrifice. It is critical that a shaman or priest from Earth passes through first, before it can be used, lest it collapses. Oh, and it was probably left behind by Shub-Niggurath.
• Superman Returns: The novelization says that Kal-El's ship reached Earth by flying through a series of wormholes.
• Supergirl (1984): Argo City is in Another Dimension. To access Earth, Kara has to fly through the "Binary Chute" that connects to Lake Michigan.
• Films based off the Ultra Series:
  • Right at the start of Ultraman Tiga Gaiden: Revival of the Ancient Giant, a golden wormhole sends Tsubasa Madoka, who is pursuing a kaiju, a few centuries into the past.
  • Ultraman Cosmos 2: The Blue Planet has a wormhole on the surface of the ocean, which leads to the underwater home of the benevolent Gyashi Aliens.

Literature

• Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days revolves around the discovery of a way to open up microscopic wormholes to any point in space past or present, which only allow light to pass through them. The plot revolves around two main points; the total removal of all privacy since anyone can be watched by anyone else at any time, and the ability for everyone to see what actually happened in historical events including the origins of religion. Unlike most stories in which wormholes are used for travel, the book is mainly about the societal changes caused by everyone having access to the truth of any events of any time.
• The Lord of Opium: Holoscreens are apparently these, which allow users on either side to transmit objects. Doing so is not recommended for whatever reason, and since the space between either end is freezing cold, living things will be killed if they try to go through.
• The Mote in God's Eye books by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have this as a central plot point.
• Brian Lumley's Necroscope: The Source has "gray holes", essentially wormholes between our world and a parallel Earth from where vampires and romanis are natives.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy has humans using wormhole-generating ZTT drives to cross interstellar distances. The mechanical type requires the ship to be spherical◊ and is bound by orbital mechanics, while the ones used by the organic Voidhawks have no such limitations, but die after a few decades. The Kiint have refined the technology to the point where they use personal teleporters to jump between distant galaxies.
• Wormholes in Voidskipper are expensive and heavy but very important. They are made from artificial black holes that have been subjected to quantum entanglement and then inflated to produce a traversable path. They come in two common varieties, both spherical.
  • Communications wormholes are microscopic and (relatively) cheap, and are used to transmit vast amounts of data between their ends.
  • Non-Orientable Wormholes tend to be made with diameters of up to a meter, and have the notable property of turning any matter that goes through them into Antimatter. They are primarily used as the cores of extremely energetic power plants, such as what a Voidskipper needs to achieve Faster-Than-Light Travel.
• From the same author: In Pandora's Star, two hipster Californian scientists invent a wormhole generator in mid-21st century, and reveal it to the world by transporting themselves to Mars to greet the NASA astronauts who were just landing there for the first time. From that day on, the very notion of space travel becomes laughable, and an interstellar empire is created with wormholes linked by train lines.
• In the Star Wars Legends novella "The Glove of Darth Vader", a wormhole created by the exploding reactor is responsible for transporting Darth Vader's indestructible glove from the exploding wreckage of the Death Star II to the oceans of Mon Calamari.
• The Time Scout portals combine this with Portal to the Past.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga has an interstellar community, "the Nexus", linked together by "wormholes". Rather than being stellar-scale objects of massive gravity, these are subtle flaws in spacetime that you need special equipment to detect and use. They are natural features of some star systems. Earth only has one, way out in the Oort Cloud. Lucky systems have a handful. Barrayar, the heroes' home planet, was cut off from the Nexus for centuries when their one wormhole unexpectedly closed.
• In The Wheel of Time, the theory behind Traveling (aportation) for male channelers is to bend space until two points are next to each other, then to drill a tiny hole. A woman warns that a female channeler (whose method is the same in effect but is quite different on the backend) attempting the same feat would fall into the gap between the two sides, which, if it's anything like other methods of hyperspace travel, is just an infinite black nothingness from which there is no escape.
• The Kadingir series is named after the technology^note Kadingir is Sumerian for "The Gate of the Gods" used by people from a parallel dimension to come and go to Earth. To open the portals they use handheld devices called alterers, which the protagonist confuses with a Game Boy of sorts and accidentaly opens a rift in the timespace continiumm that sucks her into another world.
• Star Carrier: The "TRGA cylinder"^note TRGA being an abbreviation for "Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly", Texaghu Resch being the Agletsch name for the star system where the first one was found. uses a spinning device to force the black holes at either end of a wormhole to remain open and passable.

Live-Action TV

• Farscape had a wormhole send the protagonist from our solar system into very unfamiliar space. Aliens (and thus hilarity) ensue. Later he turned wormholes into offensive weapons, learned how they could be used for travelling to different points in time as well as "unrealised" realities", and eventually he learned how to make a "wormhole weapon" (essentially a black hole that doubles in size every few minutes). When he revealed that last one, every villain who'd been hounding him for the knowledge suddenly realized wormhole weapons were exactly as bad as he'd been telling them.
• In Kamen Rider Fourze, the main hero's Super Mode, Cosmic States, can create wormholes with its weapon, the Barizun Sword.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 gets in the mix with one episode centering its skits around Professor Bobo getting sucked into a wormhole ("A wormwhat?" "A *wormhole*!" "A whathole?"), with both Pearl and the Satellite of Love following after to make sure spacetime doesn't unravel. Mike and the Bots go through most of the weirdness, which includes time flowing out of joint, Mike being turned into a puppet, and the interior of the Satellite of Love being replaced by a lovely forest grove.
• In Power Rangers S.P.D., a wormhole brought Gruumm and the Rangers back in time 20 years.
• Sliders had wormholes that could only be opened at certain times, and transported people between parallel dimensions (alternate realities would be a better pair of words). A specific device was required to create said wormholes. In fact, each timer was unique in that each had its own cycle. Should the traveler miss his/her window, he/she would have to wait for the next one with the current timer for over 29 years - a number defined by Applied Phlebotinum.
• Stargate SG-1 builds on the Stargate film, and like it, has controlled wormholes created between the titular Stargates.
  • Atlantis (the city) used a wormhole drive (rather than a hyperspace drive) to get from the Pegasus Galaxy to Earth (in the Milky Way) in a split second, where Hyperspace was taking weeks. Our Wormholes Are Different indeed.
  • This franchise also has the peculiar and arbitrary "time limit" rule. It's apparently a "law of wormhole physics" that it's impossible to maintain a wormhole for more than 38 minutes (unless it's plugged into a black hole or similar massive power source, which would suggest that it's more a limitation of the stargate's power systems than anything to do with physics). In effect, though, there seem to be more exceptions than cases of this rule being played straight.
  • During solar flares, wormholes have a tendency to travel back in time, with the strength of the flare determining how far back/forward in time the wormhole can go. Strangely, the first time this happened, SG-1 were rematerialized without a stargate, something thought to be impossible. This forms the plotline of several episodes as well as the Continuum film.
• Star Trek has wormholes. For example, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an imbalance in the matter-antimatter ratio in the ship's engines can create a temporary wormhole that traps the ship and other nearby objects — like asteroids. An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation had Ferengi trying to buy the rights to a wormhole. Deep Space Nine prominently featured a permanent wormhole as part of the premise of its show, created by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens; one episode featured a Federation scientist trying to duplicate this feat. And then there were the "micro-wormholes" used for communication between Earth and Voyager.
• Terra Nova has a wormhole that exists in one universe in the year 2149 and in another universe during the Cretaceous period. It's a rare case of a wormhole being specifically used for traveling through time (and between universes) instead of through space.
• The fugitives in Tracker (2001) came to Earth via a wormhole, and Cole used one in the final episode. The math apparently isn't easy to get, and he misjudged the timing, allowing him to come back to Earth in the very end. Zin apparently originated a lot of the wormhole stuff, then got laughed at by his fellow scientists for it.

Tabletop Games

• Blue Planet: There is exactly one known wormhole, with one terminus out past Pluto and the other in the Lambda Serpentis system, almost 40 light-years away. Transit through it is nearly instantaneous. It is generally believed that it was created by a Precursor species of some sort, as it seems highly unlikely that it was formed by chance.
• So far the only device capable of creating a wormhole in Rocket Age has the design flaw of allowing the gravity on one side of the portal effect the other, meaning that trying to use it would lead to worlds being destroyed.
• Porte sorcerers in 7th Sea have access to a rather bizarre version of portals. They can mark an object with their own blood, and then pull the object to them across a hand-sized portal, regardless of where it is. Later, they gain the ability to pull themselves to the object, regardless of where it is (rather handy if, for example, the object is in the pocket of a friend who's been imprisoned), and still later they can bring others with them. There are even rules for creating permanent Porte holes, though they cost an extreme version of Cast from Hit Points (as 7th Sea doesn't have Hit Points per se, creating a permanent Porte hole will permanently cost a number of Sorcerers a point of the primary stat that determines when damage kills them). Porte has other restrictions, though; the dimension that the Sorcerer (and any passengers) must cross is implied to one of a few cans holding Sealed Evil in a Can, either hell itself or the abode of the now-vanished Abusive Precursors (or possibly both). It is explicitly stated that anyone, sorcerer or passenger, who opens his eyes during the trip will go mad—and that the denizens of this place will whisper sweet promises to any human making the trip, if only they'd open their eyes. All the sorceries but one in 7th Sea are also weakening the boundary between the real world and hell. Porte, as it tears holes in reality itself, is implied to be one of the worst about these. Lastly, Porte sorcerers are easy to spot—they have red hands as a consequence of frequently blooding objects for their art. As a result, gloves have become fashionable in Montaigne.
  • The consequences of Porte are dire enough that at least one canon NPC has been executed by L'Empereur (an Expy of Louis XIV) by having his eyelids torn off and being cast into a Porte hole.
• In Warhammer 40,000, the Startide Nexus is a mysterious wormhole created by the events of the disastrous Fourth Sphere of Expansion that links the T'au Empire with the area of space known as the Nem'yar Atoll. How the Startide Nexus was created is unknown but the Fourth Sphere survivors claim they it was torn through the fabric of reality by a powerful entity with a nightmarish sentience.

Video Games

• While they're not specifically called "wormholes", the star lanes in Ascendancy definitely behave like the typical video game variant. Ships need a star lane drive in order to "[allow] the ship to overcome the barrier of gravitational turbulence at the opening and slip into star lane space". Star lane hyperdrives are the faster versions of regular star lane drives. Also, the more you have of either, the faster your ship moves through star lane space. There are regular star lanes (blue) and the so-called "red links", which are, basically, slow star lanes that are, usually, longer.
• In Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, the Scrin are all about this. Production structures are just anchors for wormholes reaching back to their fleet beyond Neptune (with the wormholes themselves being spherical, iridescent orbs of spatial disturbance and exotic matter) which get sucked back into the hole upon destruction. They employ the same technology to create two-way wormholes that allow them to teleport their units around the battlefield (but, being two-way, the enemy can send their own units back through them), and in their Rift Generator superweapon which opens one between your target and outer space, which will start to suck stuff (like infantry, vehicles, and structure armor) away. Finally, there's the 19 Threshold Assemblies, enormous towers that were meant to act as indestructible planet-scale Tiberium extractors and portals to ship the stuff back to their "Ichor Hub".
• Conquest: Frontier Wars has naturally occurring wormholes to travel between systems, but then they somebody starts making artificial wormholes and things get a bit complicated, then someone else steals that technology...
• Flying into a wormhole in Escape Velocity Nova will deposit you out of another random wormhole in the galaxy.
• EVE Online: the expansion pack - Apocrypha - caused numerous wormholes to open all over New Eden. They transport ships absurd distances instantly, either to elsewhere in New Eden (distances that would take an hour to travel via stargates) or to uncharted Sleeper space (which could conceivably be in an entire other galaxy). They are only open for a limited time, and will only allow a certain amount of mass through before collapsing.
  • This was also how the original EVE Gate worked in the backstory. It lasted several hundred years before collapsing and was considerably larger, but the principle was the same.
• Freelancer has Jump Gates that are implied to work as controlled wormholes, as well natural "Jump Holes"; standard recommendation is to avoid them, but it's implied that this is to prevent Ageira Technolgies (the company that developed Jump Gate technology) from losing its monopoly on FTL travel, and they're prefectly safe for the player to use.
• In FreeSpace, Subspace travel utilizes "Subspace Nodes", which are essentially wormholes that link together certain regions of space.
• In Haegemonia: Legions of Iron, wormholes are naturally-occurring space phenomena that allow rapid travel to other systems. The only other way to travel to other system is via an experimental technology that creates temporary one-way wormholes to "wormhole probes" which only becomes available in the latter stages. Wormholes can be blocked by Darzok-developed probes or natural events.
• In Ikemen Sengoku, a wormhole sends the main character and Sasuke back in time to Japan's Sengoku era and it's an important plot point in all routes that the wormhole will manifest again at only a specific time and location and missing it could mean that the MC and Sasuke might never be able to go back to their time. The wormhole also serves as Applied Phlebotinum with its behavior and properties being different in every route to prevent them from feeling too similar: in one route, the characters might need to travel back to the location the wormhole appeared in before to find it, but in another route the wormhole might be moving toward their location of its own accord, and in still another route it might suddenly display the ability to show a character visions of a Bad Future!
• In the second Master of Orion, some planets are connected by a wormhole that allows a ship to travel between the systems in a single turn regardless of the race's propulsion tech. The wormholes can span distances anywhere from a few parsecs to going from one side of the galactic map to the other.
  • A one-time special event can also create a temporary wormhole for a ship/fleet in transit, letting them finish their trip at the start of the next turn, regardless of how long they would normally have had remaining.
  • According to the manual for Master of Orion III, this is how all the original races got to this part of space in the first place. They were all exiled from a system through a giant wormhole that scattered them throughout the cluster.
• Wormholes in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident act as rapid transit between remote star systems. However, the latter stages of the game reveal that they were created by the Big Bad Mechanoids as a byproduct of them altering the universe.
• In the backstory to the original PlanetSide, wormholes are naturally occurring phenomena but fizzle out after picoseconds. The One World Order Terran Republic possesses the mean to force these random wormholes open and stabilize them, though they have no control over the destination. Auraxis and all its advanced alien technology including rebirthing was found in one such wormhole. Mysteriously, the wormhole back to Earth collapsed right as the Republic fleet was preparing to travel the wormhole stomp down the civil war on Auraxis, permanently cutting off the colonists; the war still rages to this day, and you are one of the combatants.
• The portals in Portal, though a bit more short ranged than most other examples.
  • With possible application as a shower curtain.
  • As of Portal 2, they're not so short-ranged anymore; the portal gun is capable of generating wormholes at a distance of at least 356400 km (from Earth to the Moon).
    • The portals can only be placed on certain materials such as Moon rocks. They don't do good things for your health.. So long as they have a line to the target with no other solids in the way, the portal works.
• The portals in Prey (2006), much like those in Portal, show a clear view of the destination, and have zero internal length. They also have only two dimensions and one side, and can be used to shrink things and create spatial anomalies.
• Typing in "wormhole" in the Scribblenauts games will spawn a green portal that can't be directly interacted with. After a couple of seconds, the wormhole will automatically vanish and spawn a random monster, ranging from a simple mutant or alien to Cthulhu.
• The only mode of system-to-system travel in the Space Empires series, as there is no FTL Travel. Some of them can be one-way only, though most are two-way. Random wormhole events can also fling your ships (or even bases!) hundreds of LY across the map, as a sort of... Blind Jump meets Negative Space Wedgie.
• Space Rangers has "black holes" (though their name is just pilots' slang) that randomly appear on the edges of star systems, and hurl you into a random system (be it one hyper-jump away or 50 parsecs into enemy territory). They also contain hyperspace pockets inhabited by unidentified ships.
• The Protoss of StarCraft employ some sort of wormhole-like "warp gate" to summon units to the battlefield instead of producing them. Also, plot-relevant Warp Gates, Warp Conduits and other variations on the technology are encountered throughout the campaigns and books; mention is made of a Warp Network connecting many Protoss worlds together, though their empire makes use of faster-than-light starships as well.
• Stellaris:
  • Before the 2.0 patch, wormhole creation was one of the default forms of FTL travel available to empires. Ships with this method couldn't go FTL by themselves, but if a wormhole station was in range it could generate a temporary wormhole between itself and another system to move ships.
  • 2.0 and later removed wormholes as a default FTL option but players can discover unstable wormholes that connect star systems at different ends of the galaxy. A mid-game technology allows one to stabilize them and send ships through them. Gateways are a late-game megastructure which generate wormholes allowing instant travel between two systems, similar to the pre-2.0 wormhole network except that there needs to be a gate at both ends.
  • The backstory of the Commonwealth of Man involves an unstable wormhole discovered in the Oort Cloud in the late 21st century. After a fleet of six colony arks entered it the wormhole collapsed and scattered the ships across several systems, one of them surviving to establish a colony near Deneb that would form a xenophobic military dictatorship.
  • The Shroudwalkers sell a beacon which allows empires to permanently create a wormhole between a single system and the Shroudwalker station. As this wormhole burrows through the Shroud rather than normal space, some mutations or eldritch abominations may occur.
• The X-Universe has the Lost Technology Jump Gates, which are needed to get between solar systems. None of the races know how to make them except the Terrans (who developed the tech on their own) and the Paranid (because they were told how by one of the Precursors). According to the X-Superbox Encyclopedia, the wormholes are different due to using exotic matter to power the wormhole, and by using magnetic forces to flatten the aperture. If those factors didn't occur, it would be the exact same as Real Life's theoretical wormholes.

Webcomics

• In Schlock Mercenary, the "teraport" drive works by essentially sending every subatomic particle through its own wormhole. There are also "wormgates", which theoretically produce a single wormhole big enough to pass entire starships. The wormgates can also output to multiple gates, allowing both travel to different destinations and acting as a duplicator; an entire arc centers around what the gates' owners were doing with this capability.

Web Original

• NatOne Productions's Denazra story line uses this trope for its sole in-universe means of Faster Than Light travel. Artificial wormholes link every settled system together and allow near instantaneous transportation, but opening a new world for settlement or inviting a new species to join the Coalition's long-running war requires a long journey at sub-light speeds.
• Integral to the existence of society in Orion's Arm due to the lack of any other sort of FTL travel. Actually traveling through them is time consuming and difficult, their main use is to transfer massive amount of information between star systems.
  • It takes so long because traversible wormholes need a "transition zone" clear of all massive objects that is at least 654 AU in diameter (over eight times that of the entire solar system). Nanoscale wormholes used for data transmission don't need that much space, but are extremely inefficient. Your typical 1 kilometer asteroid has a mass of about ten to the power of 12, the most powerful archailects in the setting need 1.369 times ten to the power of 16 of mass to create a one meter in radius traversable wormhole. A nanoscale wormhole of one meter in radius needs a ludicrous sixty to the power of 28 in mass. Jupiter's mass is 10 to the power of 27.

Western Animation

• Futurama:
  • In "Roswell That Ends Well", radiation from a supernova combined with radiation from Fry putting aluminum in a microwave oven to create a wormhole that sends the Planet Express crew back in time. They have 24 hours before the wormhole closes, but need microwaves to make the return trip.
  • "Into The Wild Green Yonder" ends with the crew flying into a Swirly Energy Thingy in was was supposed to be the (second) Series Finale. When the show was Un-Cancelled, it was retconned to being the Panama Wormhole, Earth's main interstellar shipping channel.
• In The Flamin' Thongs, Holden creates a wormhole by placing a worm and a doughnut in a cement mixer and spinning it at the speed of light. Needless to say, It Runs on Nonsensoleum.
• The Invader Zim episode "A Room With a Moose" had Zim attempt to send the rest of his class (but especially Dib) through a wormhole to the eponymous room with a moose. It was not stated whether this was in their dimension or another.
• On Monsters vs. Aliens, Dr. Cockroach tries to invent a teleportation device in short notice to use to get around long distances during missions, but mostly to show up his rival, alien Child Prodigy Sqweep. He manages to create a working wormhole, but unfortunately, it can only go a distance of twenty feet. Also, it turns out to be lactose intolerant, somehow. He tries to pass it off anyway, and Hilarity Ensues.
• In ReBoot, perfectly spherical "portals" connect different systems together. The "other side" is visible from all angles of viewing, distorted by the curvature of space around the opening—this is arguably the most realistic depiction of wormholes in any TV series, bar none. (Rather ironic, as ReBoot doesn't take place in the physical world and so could have easily justified a wholly unrealistic depiction.)
• Final Space: In episode 3, to escape the Lord Commander's ships, HUE steers the Galaxy 1 into a temporal worm; a wormhole that actually looks and acts like a gigantic, wormlike creature. The Galaxy 1 is able to enter before it closes its mouth, and the other ships crash into it, exploding on impact.

Black Holes as Wormholes

Comic Books

• The planet Nu Earth that Rogue Trooper is set on is located beside a traversable anomaly that's called a black hole or a wormhole Depending on the Writer.
• Experienced Green Lanterns can navigate black holes and emerge from white holes.

Films — Live-Action

• The Black Hole treats its title menace, a collapsed star, as a wormhole. And not just in theory; when we finally travel into it, it is a wormhole.
  • Though some interpretations of the ending see it as the characters travelling into the afterlife, making it a subversion.
• Event Horizon uses black hole as wormhole, a wormhole that is connected to hell!
  • Technically, they use a "quantum singularity" (as in semi-controlled artificial black hole) to power the ENGINE which creates a wormhole. Somehow. Still goes to hell though.
• The Giant Spider Invasion has a miniature black hole (that can be contained in a meteor and impact the Earth without compressing the whole thing) that apparently leads to the spider dimension. Also it can be closed off by filling it with SCIENCE!
• Star Trek (2009): It features an Unrealistic Black Hole that functions exactly like a wormhole leading to the past...when it isn't instead acting like a black hole by destroying things with no explanation of what makes it act one way or another. Or maybe two different phenomena that look exactly the same? Confusing as it is, note that the Star Trek franchise has used both wormholes and black holes on many occasions, but never mixed them up before. On a couple of occasions, black holes were used for time travel not by flying through them but by a by-product of the black hole's gravity, or warping near a black hole, or some other technobabble. This is not a case of getting the terms mixed up; the black hole is explicitly created by a collapsing star, which is (roughly) how real black holes form.
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Voyager 6 fell into "what they used to call a 'black hole'" and ended up on the far end of the galaxy. Ironically the Enterprise gets trapped in a wormhole due to a warp malfunction earlier in the movie, so they are apparently meant to be different phenomena.
• The wormhole-like phenomenon connecting the Klaatu Nebula to the Solar System in Galaxy Quest is explicitly identified as a black hole. This one has an added bonus of super-accelerating spaceships that travel through it.

Literature

• While the word "wormhole" is never used in Angel Station by Walter Jon Williams, all ships use captured black holes in order to perform FTL jumps. This requires precise calculations, which are done perfectly by one of the protagonists, because she's a "witch", a genetically-engineered girl with the ability to see and alter electron motion. Opening a "tunnel" creates in a massive radiation wave that can damage anything for thousands of miles, meaning jumps have to be made far away from planets or other ships. It is also revealed that aliens use the same method. Apparently, any ship can be equipped with devices for capturing black holes. Why they don't get torn to shreds by gravity is never brought up.
• Joe Haldeman's The Forever War uses "collapsars" to cover vast interstellar distances in the blink of an eye. These collapsars (short for collapsed stars) are probably meant to be black holes. Although transit through collapsars is instantaneous, getting to a collapsar, and then getting from the destination collapsar to where you want to finally end up, can take decades due to the fact that they're so spread out in space.
• The Humanx Commonwealth novel The End of the Matter features a white hole used not for transportation but to destroy (slowly) a black hole of equal but opposite mass. This is of course nearly as unrealistic as the trope being discussed.
• In Sphere, the future ship used a black hole that creates a wormhole, using a Kerr metric; the black hole spins so rapidly that it warps nearby spacetime so that two distant locations and times touch.

Live-Action TV

• Black Hole High originally called it a black hole, though they later speculated that it was actually a wormhole and preferred that term, despite occasionally reverting to the less accurate term for its mnemonic transfer ("Black Hole" also sounds a lot like "Blake Holsey", the name of the school). Wormholes can do just about anything in this show.
• In First Wave, Joshua claims the Gua use "white holes" to transport objects from their planet.
• A white hole appears in the Red Dwarf episode "White Hole". It spat out the matter and time that a black hole swallowed up, leading to short time loops and similar disturbances.
• Space: 1999. Moonbase falls into a "black sun" and, as per the black hole/white hole theory, comes out a white hole. Intact. Without everyone and everything being compressed into tiny tiny tiny pieces.

Music

• In the album: The Universal Migrator Part 2 - Flight of the Migrator by Ayreon, the protagonist plunges into the black hole located in the center of the quasar 3C 273 to end up in a wormhole that will carry him to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31).

Pinball

• One appears in Star Trek: The Next Generation during the "Worm Hole" mission, and sends the Enterprise across the galaxy.
  Picard: What is our exact location?
  Data: Unknown, sir.

Toys

• The Masters of the Universe Classics bio for Queen Marlena says she reached the planet Eternia after piloting an experiment warp ship through a black hole.

Video Games

• Spore treats its black holes as wormholes, and in fact often names one as the other and vice versa.
• X-COM Interceptor features black holes all over the sector that can wreck havoc on your ships and probes. Playing through the game and researching the alien intentions reveals that there is exactly one black hole that is actually a worm hole to a pocket solar system, where the aliens are constructing their doomsday weapon, and the game becomes a race against time to discover the method to use the wormhole to reach the pocket dimension and destroy the weapon before it's completed.
• In Gateway II: Homeworld, the player uses a Heechee ship to go through a black hole that leads to a pocket universe, which is the sanctuary of the entire Heechee race, who hid there after discovering the Assassins. Apparently, only certain ships are able to safely pass through the black hole, and it requires certain devices, which the Heechee promptly remove from the ship, preventing the player from leaving.
• The humans in Subverse are all descended from to spaceships from our galaxy that got sucked into a black hole.
• In Outer Wilds, the black hole at the core of Brittle Hollow is connected to a White Hole at the edge of the solar system, with everything falling into the black hole being spat out there. There's a space station nearby that unlucky players can use to teleport back to Brittle Hollow using an artificial black hole/white hole pair. Attentive players that read the teleport logs may notice that they came out of the white hole slightly before they jumped into the black hole, so this is Time Travel as well as teleportation.

Western Animation

• At the end of the Futurama episode "A Flight To Remember", the spaceship Titanic gets sucked into a black hole along with Countess Dela Rocha, the rich robot Bender fell in love with. Fry reassures Bender that no one really knows what happens in a black hole and that the Countess could still be alive somewhere. Prof. Farnsworth agrees with him, but then turns to Hermes to say "not a chance."
• Blackstar about an astronaut who gets stranded in another universe after being sucked through a black hole.

Real Life

• One Real Life outdated theory proposed that black holes are the counterparts of "white holes" located elsewhere. All of the matter and energy falling into a particular black hole is supposed to be ejected from its corresponding white hole. But even white holes are subject to their own "Ours are different" among the scientific community: Dr. Stephen Hawking suggests that the "time reversal" of a black hole is also a black hole; another common perception is that white holes recede faster-than-light from attracted matter.

Other Wormhole-like Phenomena

Comic Books

• The DC Universe has Mother Boxes that can apparently open portals between any two points. These portals are called Boom Tubes. Said Boom Tubes allows for instant transportation as well as shrinking/growing the occupants as the New Gods are huge.
• In Universal War One, scientists build a space station that can create a wormhole.

Films — Live-Action

• The electromagnetic storm in the Planet of the Apes (2001) remake, which not only goes through space, but also time.

Literature

• Bruce Coville's Book of... Spine Tinglers: When summoned, the door in One Chance is a portal in the air to another world.
• In the Carrera's Legions series, Earth and Terra Nova are connected by what's referred to as a rift that allows nearly instantaneous transition between the two star systems, the only FTL Travel option for humanity.
• The Honorverse has several wormholes but rather than a tunnel in space they are described as points where extremely powerful standing grav-waves that normally exist in hyperspace overlap with real space and allow effectively instantaneous travel between their two ends. They all come in clusters of at least two and a large portion of Manticore's wealth comes from shipping fees of their own six, later seven, terminus wormhole junction, the largest in the known galaxy.
• In Necroscope a "white hole" crash landed on a Vampire World creating a small one-way wormhole that links it with ours (specifically Romania). A few millennia later a Phlebotinum Overload in Russia's ambitious continent-wide Deflector Shield creates a much bigger wormhole in the heart of the then U.S.S.R. The twist is that each wormhole is a one way trip, but by using both you can turn them into a superhighway.
• In The Pentagon War, "hyper holes" are created by detonating very expensive hyper bombs. If two hyper bombs are set off simultaneously, and pointed directly at one another, the two hyper holes will be permanenly linked and thus create a tunnel between them through parallel space. The five inhabited star systems are linked together via these hyper hole tunnels, which also form natural choke points for invasion when they go to war with each other.
• Quantum Gravity: There are portals between realms used to get from one to the other. Or into I-space.
• A Wrinkle in Time has Tesseracts, which basically function as wormholes. Real Tesseracts have nothing to do with this, being a geometric concept related to cubes (basically, a Tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square). Wormholes were not topical at the time.
• Aeon 14: Kapteyn's Streamer is a dark matter phenomenon that trails for light-years behind the orbit of Kapteyn's Star. Its gravity is so strong that one, it's the reason Kapteyn's Star has a planetary system (the star spends most of its time in the galactic halo and seems to have stolen planets and debris during its passages through the disc), and two, it distorts space around it into a wormhole effect. Ships that pass through it are typically dumped out near Bollam's World (58 Eridani), usually hundreds or thousands of years in the future from when they left. Bollam's World was settled by a colony ship from Sirius that flew through it; afterwards, they became rich, powerful, and widely hated by capturing pre-FTL Wars ships that dump out of the Streamer, stealing their generally more advanced tech, and enslaving their crews.

Live-Action TV

• The dimensional portals in Angel.
• Jumpgates and jump points in Babylon 5 are very much wormhole-like on their ends, though the big expanse of hyperspace in between bears little resemblance to the theory. Additionally, nothing prevents a ship from going off-course, although this usually results in the ship getting lost in the constant gravitational eddies of hyperspace, and getting lost in hyperspace is usually a death sentence.
• All the strange things in Black Hole High are handwaved by the black hole/wormhole thing.
• Lexx's fractal cores, glowing swirly points in space where the Two Universes intersect.
• Wormholes haven't actually appeared on Supernatural (unless you count a few magic portals), but they have been mentioned. When The Trickster is interrogated on where a missing skeptic is, he says smugly "He didn't believe in wormholes. So I dropped him in one."

Tabletop Games

• In Starfire, every accessible star system is home to one or more naturally-occurring "warp points." A warp point provides an FTL link to another specific warp point in another star system (or, occasionally, to a warp point floating deep in interstellar space). Sometimes, one of the two warp points that forms a warp-link may be "closed" (totally undetectable unless you happen to see something coming out of it), which means there may be undiscovered warp points lurking about in any star system. (This created a dire threat to the Terran Federation during Interstellar War IV.)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse:
  • Zmei (Wyrm dragons) can tear a hole in the fabric of reality and escape to Malfeas. Any creature who follows the Zmei into this portal acquires a permanent derangment and runs a high risk of insanity.
  • To enter or exit the Umbra, Gurahl (werebears) tear a temporary wormhole into the fabric of reality.

Video Games

• Injustice 2 has Darkseid and his Boom Tubes, sans any (visible) Mother Box. His Limit Break has him conjuring Boom Tubes to keep the opponent flying as his Omega Beams blast them. In the end he summons a Boom Tube so his full sized hand grabs the minuscule super and tosses them back onto the stage.
• King's Quest: Mask of Eternity has portals that only go between two specified points, and operate on switches.
• In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you can acquire a special Fulton extraction device late in the game that uses wormholes: instead of using balloons that can be shot down by attentive enemies, the wormhole Fulton device sends people, vehicles, and containers through a portal that leads directly to Mother Base. It also can be used anywhere, regardless of the presence of a ceiling.
• Stormgates from Pirate101 are whirlpool-like wormholes act like portals that allow pirates to sail to through the stars to different parts of the Spiral.
• The Vortex Pillar from Terraria is able to spawn wormholes near the player that produce Alien Hornets. One of the mooks that accompany it can create a wormhole that summons a lightning bolt.
• The Portable Hole object in Toonstruck can be used to reach a transdimensional hub world network (floating mathematical formulae and eyeballs included) for faster travel within the game.

Real Life

• Because black holes don't mesh very neatly with quantum mechanics some physicists have put forward the idea of a "black star," which is like a black hole, but not.

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