A group of scientists now believe there might be a wormhole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy that could allow for instantaneous travel to another place in space and time, or even an entirely different universe. Lets get the ships ready — it’s time to do some explorin’.

The theory was put forth by Zilong Li and Cosimo Bambi of the Fudan University in Shanghai, noting that the assumed black hole at the center of our galaxy might actually be a wormhole. Even cooler? They also claim many or all of the black holes in our galaxy could also be wormholes, created in the “early Universe and connecting either two different regions of our Universe or two different universes in a Multiverse model.”

As Sploid notes, wormholes are allowable under the Theory of General Relativity. The problem is that we just haven’t actually proven one is out there. Yet. The research team believes some new imaging tech being installed at the European Space Observatory located on the top of Cerro Paranal in Chile could provide some answers:

Indeed, the origin of these supermassive objects is not well understood, topological non-trivial structures like wormholes are allowed both in general relativity and in alternative theories of gravity, and current observations cannot rule out such a possibility. In a few years, the VLTI instrument GRAVITY will have the capability to image blobs of plasma orbiting near the innermost stable circular orbit of SgrA∗, the supermassive black hole candidate in the Milky Way. The secondary image of a hot spot orbiting around a wormhole is substantially different from the one of a hot spot around a black hole, because the photon capture sphere of the wormhole is much smaller, and its detection could thus test if the center of our Galaxy harbors a wormhole rather then a black hole.

Obviously, there are still a lot of “what ifs” here, but could you imagine if we can actually prove the existence of wormholes? Along with instant space travel, it could also open up potential time-travel options.

Heck, in the meantime, we might just have to start digging around in Egypt to see if there’s a Stargate or two lying around …

(Via Sploid)