Stojkovic and Dai say that by monitoring the motions of stars on our side—such as S2, a known star orbiting about 17 light-hours from Sagittarius A*—we could look for tiny but perceptible accelerations caused by a wormhole’s presence. If telescopic observations of S2’s motion reach a precision of 0.000001 meter per second squared, the duo calculate such measurements could reveal the “imprint” of a star not much larger than our sun pulling on S2 from the wormhole’s far side.

If wormholes do exist, there is some question as to whether they link two points in our own universe or in two different parallel universes. For Dai and Stojkovic’s purposes, however, the difference is academic, because either scenario should produce similar detectable effects. Of course, finding a small acceleration that corresponded to a star on the other side would not be proof of the wormhole’s existence, perhaps instead hinting at unseen smaller black holes nearby, for example. But it might point in that direction. If no such acceleration were detected, given the expectation that a supermassive black hole orbited by stars would exist at a wormhole’s other side, then the presence of such a passageway in Sagittarius A* could be seemingly ruled out.

Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in China, who was not involved in the paper, notes that a failure to find any anomalous motions could carry implications just as large as those for a success. But he cautions that any excitement about such measurements would be somewhat premature. “Of course, [this study] may be too optimistic,” he says. “But in principle, it’s possible. We cannot exclude [wormholes], right now, from current observations. Sometimes you discover something even if you don’t discover anything.”

We don’t wanna freak you out, but there’s a serious likelihood that dark matter could be in the room with you right now, and could even be passing through your body as you read this.

“Yeah, absolutely. It’s here,” Yeshiva University researcher Ed Belbruno told Futurism. “Where you’re sitting, you’re feeling, on some level which is beyond our senses… that force.”

It makes sense. Dark matter, which scientists have yet to observe or measure directly, is estimated to make up 95 percent of the universe. With a substance that prevalent, the likelihood that it’s made its way to Earth and into our homes and bodies seems high, right?

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted that massive objects will bend light as it travels past them. That means that any light passing very close to an invisible black hole—but not close enough to end up inside it—will be bent in a similar way to light passing through a lens. This is called gravitational lensing, and can be spotted when a foreground object aligns with a background object, bending its light. The method has already been used to study everything from clusters of galaxies to planets around other stars.

The authors of this new research combined two types of gravitational lensing observations in their search for black holes. It started with them spotting light from a distant star suddenly magnify, briefly making it appear brighter before going back to normal. They could not see any foreground object that was causing the magnification via the process of gravitational lensing, though. That suggested the object might be a lone black hole, something which had never been seen before. The problem was that it could also just have been a faint star.

Figuring out if it was a black hole or a faint star required a lot of work, and that’s where the second type of gravitational lensing observations came in. The authors repeatedly took images with Hubble for six years, measuring how far the star appeared to move as its light was deflected.