The universe is growing, as it always has been. Not only is it growing, but the rate at which it expands continues to speed up.

These facts are backed up by significant amounts of observational data.

While astronomers know that the universe is expanding, they do not really know why.

The concept of dark matter is used to explain why the universe is expanding as it is, but the problem with dark matter is that, so far at least, we can not even prove that it exists.

A new paper published in the journal Physics Review D suggests that rather than dark energy, it is actually a huge number of wormholes being created and destroyed that is causing the expansion of the universe.

It is also possible that these wormholes are where the dark matter is present, so they aren’t trying to disprove dark matter for now at least.

In the paper, the team explains:

“Although our result was derived on the grounds of Euclidean quantum gravity… it is likely that our modification may hold for other quantum gravity theories as well.”

This means that their theory would work well in many different models, which makes it more likely than if it only worked on one.

They went on to show that their theory also works well with the concepts of dark matter and dark energy, saying:

“According to our proposal dark energy can change as time flows. This is a major advantage because recent observations suggest that the rate of expansion of the universe is different in recent times than it was in the early universe.”

They are continuing to do additional research on this concept, hoping to gather more evidence that it is true and may offer the best explanation for the growing state of the universe yet.

They commented saying:

“We are working right now on a model which calculates the rate of wormhole formation. The research seems promising and we hope to publish the results very soon.”

If they can determine exactly how many wormholes may be present, and where they are, it would be possible to start looking for them.

If found, it would go a long way toward explaining this great mystery of our universe.

Perhaps our universe really is growing due to wormholes.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.