Rimmer's escape pod entering a wormhole ("Rimmerworld", Series VI)
Wormholes were tunnels through spacetime that could transport objects to other places in The Universe, or even other dimensions. Wormholes have strange time dilation effects that caused temporal anomalies.
Appearances[]
In the episode "Backwards", the Boys from the Dwarf travel through a type of wormhole called a "Time Hole" that takes them to a version of Earth in the early 1990s - but time is running backwards. This wormhole was likely a remnant of Holly's failed attempt to get them home in the previous episode using the Holly Hop Drive.
The hologramatic starship Enlightenment travelled as tachyons through wormholes and other phenomena. It was thus able to traverse vast distances in very short periods of time. ("Holoship")
The escape pod that Rimmer used to flee a Simulant Battle Cruiser was designed to locate the nearest S3 Planet. It detected a suitable planet on the other side of a nearby wormhole. The time dilation effects inside the wormhole caused time to pass more swiftly for the traveller. The upshot of this effect was that Rimmer experienced six hundred years on his new home planet while he waited for Starbug to catch him up. ("Rimmerworld")
Starbug following Ace Rimmer's coffin into a wormhole ("Stoke Me a Clipper", Series VII)
When one version of Ace Rimmer died aboard Starbug, he left instructions for his Light Bee to be placed in a special coffin. Starbug followed the tracker on the coffin through a wormhole into another dimension, to a planet whose rings were made up of millions of identical coffins. ("Stoke Me a Clipper")
This is presumably the same wormhole Starbug later traveled through when retracing their centuries-old steps to look for the nanobot-created Red Dwarf planetoid. ("Nanarchy")
The Expanoids used the Casket of Cronus to create a Time Hole to Earth in the 1920s, with the mission of halting humanities technological progress. The Dwarfers were able to follow them trough the Time Hole to the alternate Earth they created, eventually thwarting them, and returning to Red Dwarf through the same Time Hole. ("Twentica")