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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

Warp drives, inspired by Albert Einstein’s grasp of cosmological physics, were first mathematically modeled by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. According to Alcubierre, a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel (relative to an outside observer) through a mechanism known as a “warp bubble,” which contracts space in front of it and expands space behind. The warp drive doesn’t accelerate the spacecraft locally to faster-than-light speeds; instead, it manipulates spacetime around the vessel. Such a spaceship could travel vast distances in a short period by “warping” spacetime, bypassing the light-speed limit in a way that is consistent with general relativity.

The trouble is, this model requires negative energy, a speculative form of energy where there’s less energy than empty space, which is not currently understood or achievable with today’s technology. This gap in our understanding keeps the actual construction of a warp drive, as portrayed in Star Wars and Star Trek, firmly within the realms of science fiction.

In a study uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, astrophysicist and mathematician Katy Clough from Queen Mary University of London, along with colleagues Tim Dietrich from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and Sebastian Khan from Cardiff University, explore the possibility that the hypothetical collapse of warp drives could emit detectable gravitational waves.

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