In science fiction, wormholes in the universe serve as portals through spacetime through which spacecraft can travel unimaginable distances with ease.

Scientists have long sought a deeper understanding of this phenomenon of the universe and announced Wednesday that they have created two tiny black holes by simulating them on a quantum computer and passing a message between them in the equivalent of a tunnel in space-time.

Caltech University physician Maria Spiropoulou, who co-authored the research published in the journal Nature, said the feat was achieved through a ‘baby wormhole’.

But humanity is still a long way from sending people or other species through portals like these, she said.

“Experimentally, for me, I would say it’s so far that people come up to me and ask me, ‘Can you put your dog in a wormhole?’ So no,” Spiropulu joked while answering reporters’ questions. “But it’s a big leap.”

“There’s a difference between what’s possible in theory and what’s possible in reality,” added study co-author Joseph Liken, a physicist at Fermilab, a US laboratory for particle physics and accelerators.

“So you can sit down to send your dog through a wormhole. But we have to start somewhere. I think it’s exciting to get our hands on this.”

The researchers observed simulated wormhole dynamics on a Google quantum device called the Sycamore quantum processor.

A wormhole – a rift in space and time – is a phenomenon that acts as a bridge between two distant regions of the universe. Scientists call them Einstein-Rosen bridges, named after the two physicists who described them – Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

These wormholes are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which focuses on gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe. The term “wormhole” was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s.

Spiropulu said the researchers discovered a quantum system that exhibited key properties of a gravitational wormhole, but was small enough to be implemented on existing quantum hardware.

“That’s all we can say at this point: Based on the properties we’re observing, there’s something that looks like a wormhole,” Lyken said.

Researchers said the experiment did not create rifts in space and time in the physical space, although it appeared that a traversable wormhole was created based on the quantum information teleported by the quantum codes in the quantum processor.

“These ideas have been around for a long time, and they’re very powerful ideas,” Lyken said.

“But at the end of the day, we’re in experimental science, and we’ve been struggling for a long time to find a way to explore these ideas in the lab. That’s what’s really exciting. It’s not just, ‘Okay, wormholes are cool.’ It’s a way to really look at these fundamental problems of our universe in a laboratory setting.”