New research boldly ventures into areas that physicists have not yet explored and provides clues as to what would happen to space around a failed warp drive.
Science fiction fans are familiar with the concept of a “warp drive,” a device that allows spaceships to travel faster than light or at “super-light speed.” These devices are often described as being able to manipulate the fabric of space and time itself, or spacetime. But even diehard science fiction fans may be surprised to learn that there is some theoretical speculation about warp drives in real science as well. The most famous example is the “warp drive” invented by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.
In addition, a team from Queen Mary University of London, Cardiff University, the University of Potsdam and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics have found that if spacecraft do indeed have faster-than-light warp drives, we could detect them by tiny ripples in space-time, called “gravitational waves”, that are created when these drives collapse.
“Although warp drives are purely theoretical, they have a well-defined description in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, so numerical simulations allow us to study the effects they might have on space-time in the form of gravitational waves,” team leader Katie Clow of Queen Mary University of London said in a statement.
Combined with: According to new study, “warp drives” could one day be possible
Science fiction vs. scientific facts
Warp drives in science fiction and real science usually have their roots in Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. General relativity, formulated in 1915, states that objects with mass curve the four-dimensional fabric of space-time. The gravitational effects we experience arise from this curvature.
The more massive an object is, the more it curves space and therefore the greater its gravitational effect. Light and other objects with mass are forced to circumvent the complex curvature of space.
General relativity also assumes that accelerating objects “resound” spacetime with gravitational waves. However, planetary-scale objects, such as an accelerating car, have too little mass to generate significant gravitational waves. However, massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars orbiting in binary stars and eventually colliding do generate gravitational waves that can be detected here on Earth.
Kluge and his colleagues suspect that warp drives could also emit gravitational waves, especially if they fail.
In addition, Einstein built general relativity on his special theory of relativity from 1905. Special relativity is based on the idea that nothing with mass can move faster than the speed of light.
This means that science fiction writers have to find circumstances that allow this rule to be broken, or at least slightly twisted, in order to even consider faster-than-light travel. In DC Comics, for example, there is a pervasive field outside of spacetime called the “Speed Force” that gives Wally West or the Flash the power to travel faster than light (and Superman, if you ask me).
In Star Trek, the strange negative-mass matter allows the USS Enterprise to travel faster than light, or at “warp speed,” by creating a warp bubble around the ship in which spacetime is curved and compressed in front of the ship and stretched behind it. This means that the USS Enterprise curves and warps spacetime itself, and therefore, unlike the Flash and his speed force, does not violate the rules of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
This team investigated what would happen if a warp bubble like the one used in Star Trek collapsed, or if this hypothetical concept could not contain it. To do this, they first created a digital simulation of spacetime.
The researchers found that such an event would produce a burst of gravitational waves at a higher frequency than the “chirp” of space-time waves created when binary systems of black holes or neutron stars collide and merge.
Just as the frequency of some light waves is too high to be perceived by our eyes, interferometers such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) could not detect these high-frequency bursts of gravitational waves.
However, future gravitational wave detectors may be able to detect them.
“In our study, the original shape of spacetime was the curved bubble described by Alcubierre,” said Sebastian Khan, a team member from Cardiff University. “While we were able to show that it is in principle possible to find an observable signal with future detectors, given the speculative nature of the work, this is not enough to drive the development of future instruments.”
The team also found that the breakdown of a warp drive creates alternating waves of “negative energy matter” and then positive energy. If these waves interact with normal, non-exotic matter, it would give scientists another way to look for failed warp drives.
The team now wants to investigate how the gravitational wave signal changes when considering other models of warp drives and what the consequences of the collapse that occurs when traveling at faster-than-light speeds are.
Of course, this is just speculation, albeit sound and mathematically sound, as there is no real evidence that warp drives are possible. But that doesn’t mean that these findings aren’t applicable.
“For me, the most important aspect of the study is the novelty of accurately modeling the dynamics of spacetime with negative energy and the possibility of extending the techniques to physical situations that can help us better understand the evolution and origin of our universe,” Tim Dietrich, a team member from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, said in the statement.
The team’s research results were published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
