Warp Drive

I'm going to detour a little bit from talking about the Sun to talk about something new that has come up this week: NASA Physicist unveils warp-drive craft design

Now, if you read the article, make sure you note that this is what it would look like, much like what the NX-01 Enterprise looked like from Star Trek: Enterprise TV Series.

We are not capable of creating an engine that can allow so-called faster-than-light travel.

 

I call this so-called because technically, warp drive does not allow faster-than-light travel, but apparent faster-than-light travel.  What warp drive does is warps the space ahead and back of the ship, compressing space in front and expanding space in back.  This would allow the ship apparently to move faster than light.

Special relativity tells us that faster-than-light travel is impossible in normal space, but warp drive gets around this by creating a bubble around the ship, again warping space around the bubble.

Faster-than-light travel is impossible in normal space because relativity states that the closer to the speed of light an object gets, the heavier it gets.  At the speed of light, any object with mass has an infinite mass. Therefore, to accelerate something to the speed of light requires infinite energy.

Conceptually, this is what warp drive would look like.

As you can see in front of the Enterprise, space is compressed and behind the Enterprise, it is expanded.  Unfortunately, the physics to allow warping of space is unknown and probably won't be known for a few decades or centuries.