Is it possible to travel warp speed

Gravity waves , representing ripples in the fabric of spacetime, have now been directly observed. So, yes spacetime can be warped. That year, Miguel Alcubierre wrote down a solution to the basic equations of GR that represented a region that compressed spacetime ahead of it and expanded spacetime behind to create a kind of traveling warp bubble.

This was really good news for warp drive fans. There were some problems though. These are things theorists dreamed up to stick into the GR equations in order to do cool things like make stable open wormholes or functioning warp drives. On one side, there is the shape of spacetime, and on the other, there is the configuration of matter-energy.

The traditional route with these equations is to start with a configuration of matter-energy and see what shape of spacetime it produces. But you can also go the other way around and assume the shape of spacetime you want like a warp bubble and determine what kind of configuration of matter-energy you will need even if that matter-energy is the dream stuff of negative energy.

Warp drives are simpler and much less mysterious objects than the broader literature has suggested. What Bobrick and Martre did was step back and look at the problem more generally. They showed how all warp drives were composed of three regions: an interior spacetime called the passenger space; a shell of material, with either positive or negative energy, called the warping region; and an outside that, far enough away, looks like normal unwarped spacetime.

In this way they could see exactly what was and was not possible for any kind of warp drive. Watch this lovely explainer by Sabine Hossenfelder for more details.

They even showed that you could use good old normal matter to create a warp drive that, while it moved slower than light speed, produced a passenger area where time flowed at a different rate than in the outside spacetime. So even though it was a sub-light speed device, it was still an actual warp drive that could use normal matter. Topics Astronomy and space Atomic and molecular Biophysics and bioengineering Condensed matter Culture, history and society Environment and energy Instrumentation and measurement Materials Mathematics and computation Medical physics Optics and photonics Particle and nuclear Quantum.

Sign in Register. Enter e-mail address Show Enter password Remember me. Sign in to Unlock all the content on the site Manage which e-mail newsletters you want to receive Read about the big breakthroughs and innovations across 13 scientific topics Explore the key issues and trends within the global scientific community.

Enter e-mail address This e-mail address will be used to create your account. Reset your password. Please enter the e-mail address you used to register to reset your password Enter e-mail address.

Registration complete. Warp drive: could positive-energy solitons move a spacecraft faster than the speed of light? Want to read more? And will humans be making the jump to warp speed anytime soon?

General Relativity states that space and time are fused and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. General relativity also describes how mass and energy warp spacetime — hefty objects like stars and black holes curve spacetime around them.

Early science fiction writers John Campbell and Asimov saw this warping as a way to skirt the speed limit. What if a starship could compress space in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it? In , Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within the laws of General Relativity. So, what does that mean? Imagine the distance between two points is 10 meters 33 feet.

If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds to get to point B. Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be able to reach point B in about one second.

In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving faster than light in the space around you. Proxima Centauri here we come, right? The warp drive would require either negative mass — a theorized type of matter — or a ring of negative energy density to work. Physicists have never observed negative mass, so that leaves negative energy as the only option.

To create negative energy, a warp drive would use a huge amount of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles. For example, if an electron and an antielectron appear near the warp drive, one of the particles would get trapped by the mass and this results in an imbalance.

This imbalance results in negative energy density. But for a warp drive to generate enough negative energy, you would need a lot of matter.