We May Be Able To Detect Gravitational Distortions from Broken Warp Drives

A new paper from an international team of physicists has outlined the possibility that we may be able to detect the gravitational waves that spill out of a malfunctioning warp drive—provided a spacetime-bending craft belonging to one of our interstellar neighbors happens to be nearby—using technology that is already looking for natural sources of gravitational waves.

Although the concept of a warp drive has been around since John W. Campbell’s 1931 novel Islands in Space, and later popularized by 1967’s Star Trek, the idea of bending—or rather compressing and expanding—spacetime to propel a craft through the cosmos was cemented in real-world physics by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, when the theoretical physicist published a paper titled “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity” that illustrated the physics of how such a drive might work.

Although there are numerous teams of researchers tackling the engineering challenge that stands between us and making such a propulsion method a reality, it may be impossible to produce a real-world warp drive for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, a team of physicists is looking into how we might detect a malfunctioning warp-capable craft that happens to be passing by, essentially leaking gravitational waves as it loses containment of the device.

“Even though warp drives are purely theoretical, they have a well-defined description in Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, and so numerical simulations allow us to explore the impact they might have on spacetime in the form of gravitational waves,” explained lead study author Dr. Katy Clough of Queen Mary University of London.

By Clough’s team’s calculations, a collapsing warp engine would produce a distinctive signature in the form of a short, high-frequency burst of gravitational waves, a signal that would differentiate itself from the characteristic “chirps” generated by natural sources of gravitational waves like merging black holes or neutron stars.

The collapse of such a drive would first emit a wave of the negative energy matter that powers the drive, followed by an alternating pattern of positive and negative gravity waves; these patterns would result in a net increase in the overall energy of the waves being generated, possibly providing another distinctive signature if the waves were to interact with ordinary matter.

Although we have the technology to detect gravitational waves, observatories like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) are tuned to pick up on the lower frequency waves that are generated by natural sources, and would likely miss artificial sources altogether. However, Clough’s team expects that future detectors could be built with these higher frequencies in mind. Unfortunately, the team believes that the speculative nature of their work might not be sufficient to justify building upcoming observatories with this function in mind.

“While we were able to demonstrate that an observable signal could in principle be found by future detectors, given the speculative nature of the work, this isn’t sufficient to drive instrument development.”

Although the ideas outlined in this paper may never come to fruition within our lifetimes, the exploration of how exotic concepts like negative energy and matter might work can be applied to their more mundane positive counterparts, offering “the possibility of extending the techniques to physical situations that can help us better understand the evolution and origin of our universe, or the avoidance of singularities at the center of black holes,” according to study co-author Dr. Tim Dietrich, a professor with the Max Planck Institute’s Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity.

“It’s a reminder that theoretical ideas can push us to explore the universe in new ways,” Clough adds. “Even though we are skeptical about the likelihood of seeing anything, I do think it is sufficiently interesting to be worth looking at.”