The galaxy is many things. It is very large. It is very confusing. But, 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.

A paper published in the Annals of Physics shows mathematical evidence that a massive black hole in our galaxy is actually a wormhole. If this exists, it would be possible for humans to navigate it. This theory of awesomeness provides several formulas to argue it’s mathematically possible for there to be a wormhole waiting for us in the Milky Way. This portal could be as big as the galaxy itself, and if it exists, we are able to navigate it, the study says.

“Our result is very important because it confirms the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies,” the researchers write in their conclusion.

Although space-time tunnels (or wormholes or Einstein-Penrose bridges) have only recently gained great popularity among the public thanks to Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi film, they have been the focus of astrophysicists’ attention for many years.

“What we tried to do in our study was to solve the very equation that the astrophysicist ‘Murph’ was working on. Clearly we did it long before the film came out,” jokes Paolo Salucci one of the paper’s authors. “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.” Can it ever be tested experimentally?

“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.”

Other “spiral” galaxies similar to the Milky Way – like its neighbour Andromeda – may also contain wormholes, the scientists believe.

“In my opinion, our speculation is more likely than postulating other even more exotic theories like the existence of dark supersymmetric matter particles, changes in the gravitational universal law or even anti-gravity,” Salucci said.

“Dark matter may supply the fuel for constructing and sustaining a wormhole. Hence, wormholes could be found in nature and our study may encourage scientists to seek observational evidence for wormholes in the galactic halo region.”

“Perhaps it’s time for scientists to take this issue ‘seriously’,” concludes Salucci. “Dark matter may be ‘another dimension’, perhaps even a major galactic transport system. In any case, we really need to start asking ourselves what it is.”

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Journal Reference: https://goo.gl/QQqxUs.

News release: https://goo.gl/CL6cGd.