Contact is the name of a novel written by Carl Sagan, a renowned scientist and science promoter from USA.
The novel is about an female astronomer who regrets his dead father. She is working on SETI to detect extraterrestrial life by means of radio signals from distant stars and planets. She receives a complex message as an introduction: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, ..., which are the prime numbers. The people at SETI keeps receiving messages from an alien civilization located in Vega star. With the messages sent from there, the scientists can build a machine to make interestellar travel through wormholes. The main character travels to Vega and his father receives it. She understands that the aliens use their memories for that. They speak a lot about science and the Earth and they tell that they will help our society in the future. She goes back to Earth and the government does not believe on her story, because she has no physical evidence, as the cameras put on the machine only filmed static. But they doubt about their claim when they found out that it had passed 48 hours in the film, not the time she was out, which were only some minutes, maybe due to the Relativity of Time.
Carl Sagan use the idea of wormholes from a colleague called Kip Thorne, who was working on these type of new possibilities. Sagan asked him to create a theory about it and Kip Thorne gave him the theory of wormholes for interestellar travel, which is his specialty.
The novel was sent to the screen in a movie protagonized by Jodie Foster, as the astronomer.