Without getting philosophical, what if we were the journey and not the destination? Really. New evidence and theories suggest that the Milky Way is just one big wormhole - a space-time tunnel, according to a press release by Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA).
"If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But there's more," said Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist from SISSA and a dark matter expert. "We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Just like the one we've all seen in the recent film 'Interstellar.'"
The scientist said that despite the movie's popularity and the propulsion of the idea that the galaxy is a wormhole, scientists got to it first before filmmakers did.
"What we tried to do in our study was to solve the very equation that the astrophysicist 'Murph' was working on," Salucci said jokingly, according to the press release. "Clearly we did it long before the film came out. It is, in fact, an extremely interesting problem for dark matter studies."
"Obviously we're not claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility ... 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."
Combining equations of general relativity with a dark matter map of the galaxy, astrophysicists developed their hypothesis. "The map was one we obtained in a study we carried out in 2013," explained Salucci. "Beyond the sci-fi hypothesis, our research is interesting because it proposes a more complex reflection on dark matter."
