The first stable wormhole ever discovered, its exits connect the space around the Alpha Quadrant planet of Bajor to the Idran star system in the Gamma Quadrant, some 90,000 light years away. The distance from the two points would take 600 years for a Starfleet ship to travel at warp factor 9, if it were to travel through ordinary 3 dimensional distances, but through the wormhole, which bends space/time so severely the two distances almost touch, a few minutes are all that is needed.

The Bajoran wormhole is unlike all others in the extraordinary fact that it is inherently stable. Unknown aliens are reportedly responsible for its construction, which was done with the use of particles called 'verterons' that limits space vessels to pass through on impulse power only. In 2369, Capt. Benjamin Sisko and Lt. Jadzia Dax stumbled on the Alpha Quadrant side of the wormhole shortly after Starfleet was requested to establish a presence on former Cardassian mining station Terok Nor. For this, which fulfilled certain Bajoran prophecies, Benjamin Sisko was honored as their Emissary. Alien entities living within the wormhole have actually appeared in the forms of corporeal beings to Sisko and other travelers they wish to reveal themselves to (usually adopting the looks of close acquaintances). These aliens are the Prophets that Bajorans honor. They do not belong in our dimension, rather, they live in a nonlinear time-line, where past present and future are all the same and all easily accessible.

Most wormholes are either naturally occurring or the result of dangerous warp drive malfunctions. The vast majority of natural wormholes either wander aimlessly around the universe or has one end oscillating wildly across time and space: here one second, gone the next, rendering them useless for interstellar commerce. Recent research into developing a method of generating an stable artificial wormhole have had initial success, proving the theory feasible. However, the amount of time that the wormhole can hold integrity is still to short for commercial value yet.

Wormhole Theory In the 20th century, there already were speculation that severe distortions in the space/time continuum could result in anomalies designated the name of "wormhole". As its imagery suggests, just as a worm burrows through an apple, the wormhole acts as a fourth dimensional "channel" between two points, allowing travel in a fraction of the time it would take with the conventional straight-forward approach. This is the result of distorted space/time, which can affect physical distances.

Essentially, there were some ideas thrown up that speculated a wormhole was the connection between a black hole with a white hole. Black holes are massive neutron stars whose gravitational pull exceeded the force of the counteracting neutron repulsion (known as the Pauli exclusion principle) and collapsed all of its mass into a singularity. White holes are less well-known, mainly because it has been almost wholly speculative, without proof either directly nor indirectly at this time. In general relativity, it is defined as the 'time reversed' version of the black hole where all possible geodesics are for particles that only emerge from the singularity and exit the white hole's event horizon into the outside universe.

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity established gravitational force as a curvature of space/time. In this case, a black hole is defined as matter whose center approaches infinite density. However, one can never see the point of singularity, which is perpetually hidden by the nebulous accretion disc surrounding it. In the 1960's, studies indicated that the end of a black whole could be connected with that of a white hole. Wormholes are believed to be built into the structure of space-time at the Planck length, (Gh/c^3)^(1/2) =1.6 *10(-35) meters. At twenty times smaller than the width of an atomic nucleus, this is far beyond our ability to measure. However, predictions made by the quantum theory of gravity suggest that wormholes should be continually created and destroyed at the Planck length. That means we would be surrounded by trillions of wormholes forming and collapsing trillions of times a second. Hawking has recently argued that this phenomena may explain the nature of the physical constants, like G, h and c.

Though no credible evidence has supported the wormhole theory, but, as with everything else in astrophysics, hard facts are hard to determine. Much more work on cosmology and the origin of the universe remains be done.