{"id":141214,"date":"2022-06-28T03:01:44","date_gmt":"2022-06-28T08:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/spacecraft-in-warp-bubble-could-travel-faster-than-light"},"modified":"2022-06-28T03:01:44","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T08:01:44","slug":"spacecraft-in-warp-bubble-could-travel-faster-than-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/spacecraft-in-warp-bubble-could-travel-faster-than-light","title":{"rendered":"Spacecraft in \u2018warp bubble\u2019 could travel faster than light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/spacecraft-in-warp-bubble-could-travel-faster-than-light2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Special relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum \u2013 making it unlikely that humans will ever send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way. However, new research by Erik Lentz at the University of G\u00f6ttingen suggests there could be a way beyond this limit. The only catch is that his scheme requires vast amounts of energy and so may never actually be able to propel a spacecraft (<a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.1088\/1361-6382\/abe692\">Class. Quant. Grav. <b>38<\/b> 075015<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Lentz proposes that conventional energy sources could arrange the structure of space\u2013time in the form of a soliton \u2013 a robust singular wave. This soliton would act like a \u201cwarp bubble\u2019\u201d, contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Unlike objects within it, space\u2013time itself can bend, expand or warp at any speed. A spacecraft contained in a hyperfast bubble could therefore arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.<\/p>\n<p>It had been thought that the only way to produce a warp drive was by generating vast amounts of negative energy \u2013 perhaps by using some sort of undiscovered exotic matter or by manipulating dark energy. To get around this problem, Lentz constructed an unexplored geometric structure of space\u2013time to derive a new family of solutions to Einstein\u2019s general relativity equations called positive-energy solitons. Though Lentz\u2019s solitons appear to conform to Einstein\u2019s general theory of relativity and remove the need to create negative energy, space agencies will not be building warp drives any time soon, if ever. Part of the reason is that Lentz\u2019s positive-energy warp drive requires a huge amount of energy. According to Lentz, a 100 m radius spacecraft would require the energy equivalent to \u201chundreds of times the mass of Jupiter\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Special relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum \u2013 making it unlikely that humans will ever send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way. However, new research by Erik Lentz at the University of G\u00f6ttingen suggests there could be a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,41,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-information-science","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}