How humans could travel millions of light years to distant planets in SECONDS

From Interstellar to Star Wars, science fiction is filled with stories of how humans might travel through the universe to visit distant worlds.

But even with our most advanced modern rockets, travelling to the edges of our own solar system might take most of a human lifetime.

However, scientists say that there is a way humanity could travel millions of light years in seconds.

By passing through wormholes in the fabric of space and time itself, we might be able to travel to the most distant stars with ease.

A wormhole, much like a black hole, is a structure which arises when gravity is so strong that it bends the fabric of the universe.

Einstein’s theories about the universe predict that spacetime can be bent in such a way that it creates a ‘bridge’ between two different points in the spacetime.

Professor Dejan Stojkovic, a cosmologist from the University at Buffalo, told MailOnline: ‘Theoretically, there is no limit on how far we could travel that way.

‘Two distant points could be billions of light years away along the regular space, and only a few seconds away along the wormhole.’

What are wormholes?

Dr Andreea Font, a theoretical astrophysicist from Liverpool John Moores University, told MailOnline: ‘Wormholes are “tunnels” in the fabric of space and time that can shortcut the normal path between two far-away regions in our universe.’

According to Einstein, an object with mass warps the fabric of spacetime like a weight being dropped onto a rubber sheet. These curves are what create the force of gravity.

But Einstein’s equations also have some extremely weird solutions when gravity starts to become extremely strong.

‘For example, we know that black holes can bend the space around them under the influence of gravity,’ says Dr Font.

‘In principle, the geometry of space-time can be folded and bent in such a way that a tunnel can be established between two massive black holes at faraway places.’

The connection between these distant points is what scientists call a wormhole.

Where this tunnel emerges into space is called the mouth and the tunnel is called the throat.