Warp Drives Could Push Gravitational Waves Through The Cosmos

Will future humans employ warp drives to explore the universe? We’re in no position to jettison the possibility. But if our distant progenies ever do, it definitely won’t involve dilithium crystals, and Scottish twangs will have evaporated into history by then.Warp drives have their origins in one of the most popular science fiction franchises ever, but they do in fact have a scientific basis. A new paper scrutinizes the science behind them and probes if a warp drive containment failure would release detectable gravitational waves. Title of the paper is “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse.” The authors are Tim Dietrich, Katy Clough, and Sebastian Khan, physicists from institutions in Germanyand the UK.

There’s some room for warp drives in general relativity, and in 1994Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre explained how they could theoretically work. He’s famous in space and physics circles for his Alcubierre Drive.Everybody knows that no object can travel quicker than the speed of light. But warp drives may in fact offer a workaround. By warping spacetime itself, a spaceship with a warp drive wouldn’t be breaking the FTL (faster-than-light) rule.”Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel,”write the authors.

There are clear scientific hurdles to actually making a warp drive. But it’s very much possible to simulate how one would work and how they may be in fact detectable via gravitational waves in the event of a failure. Warp drives alter spacetime itself, just like binary mergers of compact objects likeneutron stars and black holes. It’s theoretically quite possible that they discharge a gravitational wave signal in the same manner as mergers.”To search for such signals and to correctly identify them in the measured data, it is important to understand their phenomenology and properties,” explain the authors.It starts with understanding how basically warp drives might work, and for that, we have to dig deep into physics.

“The principle idea behind a warp drive is that instead of exceeding the speed of light directly in a local reference frame, which would violate Lorentz invariance, a ‘warp bubble’ could traverse distances faster than the speed of light (as measured by some distant observer) by contracting spacetime in front of it and expanding spacetime behind it,” the paper states.