What if our galaxy was just one massive wormhole that we could use to travel from one end of the cosmos to another?
That might sound like something from Christopher Nolan's 2014 film, Interstellar, but physicists now think it's also something that's very possible.
Scientists came up with this new theory while studying the nature of dark matter. Dark matter, as most of us know, is tricky. We know that it exists, but we've never seen actual evidence of it. Therefore, we don't really know what it is and all we have are theories. A team of physicists recently questioned what we've theorized so far about dark matter and believe that maybe we've been thinking about it all wrong.
These physicists used a map of dark matter in the Milky Way and combined it with the latest computer models of the Universe's creation, the Big Bang, while considering that space-time tunnels are real. In their hypothesis, they realized that it is actually probable that these wormholes exist and that they could be huge, even reaching the full size of our galaxy.
But there's more. These physicists believe that we could travel through these tunnels, just like the actors did in Interstellar, making science fiction potentially science fact.
Obviously, these scientists weren't trying to prove something from a movie: they've been working on the concept of wormholes for years. They have even worked on the equation that Interstellar character Murph worked on as part of their studies on dark matter.
Their studies lead to a much more complicated concept of what dark matter actually is. These new ideas would also explain why it's been so difficult to find evidence of dark matter (even CERN has failed). Of course, most searches for dark matter, or evidence of it, rely on a particle called a neutralino. Salucci and his team suggest that maybe we should forget about that particle and consider that dark matter is something else, such as "another dimension" or a "major galactic transport system."
"Obviously we're not claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility," says Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist of the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste. "In principle, we could test it by comparing two galaxies -- our galaxy and another, very close one like, for example, the Magellanic Cloud, but we are still very far from any actual possibility of making such a comparison."
