A study conducted by Miguel Alcubierre, the director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico's Nuclear Sciences Institute, has proposed a new idea to travel faster than light. As per a report published in the New York Times, Miguel Alcubierre has put forward a solution to travel faster than light, called 'warp bubble'.
This is theoretically possible as it compress the space in front of the spaceship and will expand the space behind it. It allows the spaceship to overcome general relativity, and thus it can travel at a higher speed than light by remaining stationary inside the warp bubble.
Making things more clear, Alpha Centauri is our closest neighboring star system which lies approximately 4.4 light years away. To reach there quickly, space agencies should put a spaceship in a warp bubble after shrinking the space in front and expanding the space behind. The starship will then arrive Alpha Centauri in just 4.4 years.
Alcubierre also made it clear that the concept of traveling via warp bubble is very similar to that of a moving walkway in an airport.
"You just stand there and you move. You don't have to walk. It just pushes you along," said Alcubierre, New York Times reports.
To travel via warp bubble, energy is needed, and initial calculations revealed that it demands an impossibly gargantuan amount of energy, much more than the energy that exists in the universe to materialise this plan. Later, researchers found that the energy demanded to create a warp bubble will be very much equivalent to Jupiter's mass converted to energy.
If scientists succeed in traveling at a speed greater than light, it could break all current theories of physics. Traveling faster than light may also help humans to travel across time, a concept which is mostly depicted in Hollywood science fiction movies.
Legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final work before his death on March 2018 also talked about the possibilities of time travel.
"Rapid space travel and travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding. Einstein showed that it would take an infinite amount of rocket power to accelerate a spaceship to beyond the speed of light. So the only way to get from one side of the galaxy to the other in a reasonable time would seem to be if we could warp space-time so much that we created a little tube or wormhole," wrote Stephen Hawking.
Hawking also added that creating warp bubbles which may allow traveling above the speed of light, could be made possible by future civilisations which may be highly advanced.
