Could our Milky Way galaxy contain a giant wormhole like the faster-than-light rapid transit system shown in the movie "Interstellar"? Theoretically, maybe so — but don't pack your bags or your rocket ship anytime soon.
The question is given serious consideration in a study published by the Annals of Physics. Researchers from Italy, India and the United States determined that when you include dark matter, the mysterious stuff that accounts for about 80 percent of the universe's mass, the density could be great enough to allow for the creation of a wormhole at the center of the galaxy's dark matter halo.
Last year, some of the team's members proposed that wormholes could exist in the halo's outer regions. The researchers said their latest paper is "an important complement to the earlier result, thereby confirming the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies."
"Confirming" is an overly strong word, even if it relates to "possible" rather than actual existence.
As most "Star Trek" fans could tell you, wormholes are supposed to be extradimensional tunnels that connect two distant points on the space-time continuum. Such tunnels assume that the fabric of space-time can be distorted and warped strongly enough to make the connection. If wormholes exist, they could be used to travel at what would effectively be faster-than-light speeds, and could thus serve as a kind of time machine.
For decades, wormholes have played key roles in science-fiction tales — most recently in "Interstellar."
One of the paper's authors is Paolo Salucci of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, also known by the Italian acronym SISSA. In a news release, Salucci said a hypothetical wormhole at the center of the Milky Way could be navigable, just like the wormhole that Murph Cooper (played by Jessica Chastain) puzzled over in "Interstellar."
Now if we could just find a nearby wormhole to get to the other wormhole. To read more and view the video, click here.