Caption image:  Geometry of a wormhole (WH) endowed with a bridge, usually called WH throat, connecting two universes (supposed to be asymptotically flat), and having neither horizons nor physical singularities.

In this talk, I speak about wormholes, which are exotic astrophysical objects endowed with no horizons and physical singularities, characterized by a throat that connect two different parts of the same or different universes. Although they are widely studied from a theoretical point of view, there are not yet observational evidences of their existence. For such a reason, I, together with other collaborators, have developed an astrophysical technique based on the concept of epicyclic frequencies, which is a strategy widely used in high-energy astrophysics to infer information on a given self-gravitating system and on the related gravity background. I explain how to detect the signature of a wormhole (distinguishing it from a black hole) and how to reconstruct wormhole solutions through the fit of the observational data. Finally, I discuss the implications of the proposed epicyclic method.

Brief CV of Dr. Vittorio De Falco:

I was born in Napoli and I graduated in Mathematics at the University of Napoli “Federico II” with a thesis in Cosmology under the supervision of Prof. Salvatore Capozziello and Prof. Antonio Romano. Then I moved to Switzerland, where I started a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, enrolled at the University of Basel and working also at the International Space Science Institute in Bern under the supervisions of Prof. Maurizio Falanga, Prof. Luigi Stella, and Prof. F. K. Thilemann. In July 2018 I defended my doctoral thesis on the general relativistic Poynting-Robertson effect and its applications to accretion phenomena in high-energy astrophysics. Later, I covered some Postdoctoral positions at the University of Opava (Czech Republic), Stefanik Observatory and Planetarium (Slovak Republic), and (currently) University of Napoli “Federico II”. My research topics are mainly focused in General Relativity and its applications in high-energy astrophysics towards compact objects, like black holes, neutron stars, and wormholes. In particular, I gave several contributions to the advancement of the general relativistic Poynting-Robertson effect, approximation of ray-tracing equations and its astrophysical applications, developing strategies to detect wormholes and inquire gravity in strong field regimes, and currently also to gravitational wave theory framed in Einstein-Cartan framework, where, beside to explore the general relativistic effects, I am examining also the observational signature of the quantum spin and its contributions on detected gravitational wave signals.