Our very own Milky Way could host a huge bridge in space-time. At least, that’s what the authors of a recent study have suggested.
According to the group, teamwork between Indian, Italian, and North American scientists at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy, the central disk of Milky Way may host the necessary dark matter to support the formation and nourishment of a “stable and controllable” tunnel to a distant section of space-time –known as a wormhole. The group’s study was issued in the November 2014 issue of Annals of Physics. A pre-print of this research paper is also available at arxiv.org. (Image: A graphic of the arrangement of a hypothesized wormhole (Credit: NASA))
Wormholes (also known as Einstein- Rosen Bridge) were first theorized by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen suggested their idea as a way to get around the notion of black hole singularities. Rather than making a knot of infinite density, Einstein and Rosen believed, the immense energy inherent in such a huge body would twist space-time to such a degree that it bent over on itself, permitting a bridge to generate between two detached regions of the Universe. Unfortunately, these wormholes would be tremendously unstable and would need huge amounts of “negative energy” to stay open.
But according to the research group at SISSA, huge amounts of dark matter could deliver this required fuel. By means of a model of dark matter’s richness that is founded on the rotation curves of other spiral galaxies, the scientists established that the scattering of dark matter in the Milky Way produced explanations in general relativity that would, hypothetically, permit a stable wormhole to arise. Paulo Salucci, an astrophysicist on the group from SISSA, described: “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 hypothesis 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. 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.” Obviously, Salucci and the other scientists were working on this task long before Interstellar was released, but their outcome does provide some theoretical backing to the concepts in the film – concepts that were also fact-tested and reviewed by physics guru Kip Thorne of Caltech.
The authors of this research paper consider that their result strengthens the significance of discerning the accurate nature of dark matter. According to Salucci, “Dark matter may be ‘another dimension’, maybe even a main galactic passage system. In any case, we really need to start asking ourselves what it actually is.” Salucci continued, “Obviously we’re not claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility.” The scientists went on to describe that their notion could be verified experimentally by relating our own Milky Way, a spiral galaxy, with a neighboring galaxy of a different type. By equating the dark matter dispersals between the two galaxies, researchers would possibly be able to use general relativity to probe variances in their space-time dynamics.
The research was published in 2014 but more and new explanations and statements have been made by the authors of the research.
The research was published in 2014 but more and new explanations and statements have been made by the authors of the research.
