But if you can warp space and break that limit, traveling through space with the capability to outrace a photon, you can speed through the Universe and see stars, galaxies and portions of the Universe that will never have their light reach Earth. Not only can you "catch" anything moving away from you through space, even if space itself expands faster than the speed of light, but it enables you to catch galaxies past the edge of the observable Universe! We can presently only see as far as light has traveled through the expanding Universe over the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. Acknowledgement: Mathilde Jauzac (Durham University, UK and Astrophysics & Cosmology Research Unit, South Africa) and Jean-Paul Kneib (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland). credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, HST Frontier Fields. Could warp drive enable us to reach those galaxies after all? Peter Tibbles asks exactly that:Ī distant cluster of galaxies that would be unreachable without warp drive technologies. But in 1994, Miguel Alcubierre discovered a solution in General Relativity that catapulted warp drive into the realm of the physically possible. For another, it was thought that gravity was working to pull the distant galaxies back towards one another, and that if you traveled close enough to the speed of light, you'd eventually reach anything we didn't know about dark energy. In 1998, the accelerating Universe taught us that only 3% of the galaxies in the observable Universe would ever be reachable at the speed of light. For one, warp drive was simply a plot device to reach the distant stars without having characters and the Universe age it was thought to violate Einstein's relativity as a physical impossibility. When warp drive was first brought into the public consciousness with the debut of Star Trek fifty years ago, our understanding of the Universe was fundamentally different than it is today. The starship Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, The Hunted.
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