Humanity has always tried to go beyond the Universe, to unravel the mystery of space objects. At the same time, people did not even suspect that they were living inside a "wormhole" - a tunnel in space-time. This is the conclusion made by scientists based on calculations of the distribution of dark matter.
About a year ago, director Christopher Nolan made a film called Interstellar. The plot of this fantastic film is based on modern physics, not computer special effects. The general idea belongs to the physicist and astronomer from the United States Kip Thorne.
There is an episode in the film when the main characters are sent to the other end of the universe through a space object called a "wormhole". This is how experts call a feature of space-time that allows you to instantly get from one point in space to another, without overcoming the distance between them. It is as if leaving the house, right there in a completely different place, for example, somewhere in the jungle. It seems impossible, however, modern scientists are seriously engaged in the study of such phenomena. So, our universe can actually be much more complex than it seems.
Recall that a hundred years ago Albert Einstein came up with his general theory of relativity. Its essence lies in the fact that the properties of time-space can change under the influence of objects with mass and energy. This theory explains the gravitational effects observed by physicists as accurately as possible.
For example, take the satellites of the GPS navigation system. As scientists have found out, on satellites located at an altitude of more than 20 thousand kilometers, time passes more slowly than on Earth. For a year, the clock there lags behind the Earth by 0.014 seconds. Of course, this is not so much, but even such an insignificant error significantly affects the accuracy of determining the coordinates. According to experts, near large objects (in this case, the planet Earth), time flows faster than at a distant distance from them.
Also, based on the general theory of relativity, the researchers deduced another consequence - the possibility of the existence in space of objects such as wormholes and black holes. All the same Kip Thorne a quarter of a century ago suggested the possibility of travel in space, through the so-called wormholes. However, until now, researchers all over the world have not been able to take pictures and show what this wormhole is like?
According to Einstein's equations, the properties of space and time are related to the properties of matter. Is it possible to determine to what extent the existence of a wormhole corresponds to general relativity? To do this, you must first establish how the movement along this very hole should take place. According to scientists, it must be stable in time, be large enough, and not have strong gravity, otherwise the objects falling into it will simply be torn apart.
Having found a solution to the Einstein equations that satisfies all these conditions, it will be possible to declare with all confidence that the existence of such an object in space is theoretically possible. That is, the theory, on the one hand, assumes the possibility of the existence of a wormhole, but on the other does not help in any way in its search.
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Despite numerous studies, modern astronomy continues to have a number of so far insoluble questions. First of all, we are talking about dark matter - a mysterious substance that has a mass, but is completely invisible. Astrophysicists have declared the existence of dark matter by observing the motion of galaxies. They found that their mass does not correspond to the distribution of the speed of motion of stars in outer space.
Scientists then suggested that there is some invisible matter that affects the gravitational interaction of bodies in the universe. It is noteworthy that the proportion of visible matter does not actually exceed five percent of all matter in space. The rest of the space is made up of dark matter and dark energy, the nature of which researchers have never been able to figure out.
Astrophysicists and mathematicians from the United States, Italy and India have compared the distribution of dark matter with the mathematical parameters of a wormhole in our galaxy. Thus, they found that the assumption that the Milky Way belongs to a huge wormhole does not contradict the famous theory of Einstein.
Thus, for many centuries humanity has been peering into the sky and trying to find answers to its questions there, but at the same time it is inside a wormhole. And even if this is only a scientific hypothesis, in the future it may turn out that this is actually the case.