Is our galaxy just one giant wormhole?

TRIESTE, Italy, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Are we living inside a giant wormhole? Maybe, if researchers at the International School for Advanced Studies are to believed.

Scientists at Italy's Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, or SISSA, suggest the Milky Way is simply one big space-time transport system -- a cosmic tunnel across the universe.

The new paper involves researchers from the United States, Italy and India, and incorporates the latest theories and scientific evidence concerning dark matter and the beginning of the universe. Researchers say they're not positing the Milky Way is a wormhole, only that it could be.

A wormhole is essentially a shortcut through the space-time continuum (the combination of three-dimensional space, plus time)

"If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way [developed in a separate 2013 study] with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize 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," SISSA astrophysicist Paolo Salucci explained in a press release.

"But there's more," Salucci added. "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."

More than just lend credence to the sometimes criticized ideas of Interstellar, the new study superimposes the most advanced dark matter models on a massive scale -- the scale of the entire galaxy.

"Beyond the sci-fi hypothesis, our research is interesting because it proposes a more complex reflection on dark matter," Salucci said.

The scientists acknowledge this kind of research will remain highly theoretical until scientists can do a better job of figuring out exactly what dark matter is.

The new study is set to be published in the journal Annals of Physics.