We’re a long way from developing warp drive – a way to travel faster than light. But scientists have an idea of what the end of a warp trip might sound like – a short, high-frequency “chirp” in the form of gravitational waves.

The laws of gravity say that warp drive isn’t impossible. A ship could enfold itself in a “bubble” of spacetime. The drive would “squeeze” the spacetime ahead of the ship, and expand the spacetime behind it. As seen by an outside observer, that would allow the ship to move faster than light. There are all kinds of problems to solve, but perhaps future generations can make it so.

Researchers in Europe recently checked out some of the physics of warp bubbles. As they wrote in their paper, they wanted to “explore strange new spacetimes – to boldly simulate what no one has seen before.” So they created computer models to probe the signals a starship might create when it either “engaged” or dropped out of warp.

They found that a collapsing warp bubble could produce a quick burst of gravitational waves – “ripples” in spacetime. They’d be at a frequency that current detectors couldn’t hear – but future detectors might. In fact, the waves might be detectable from millions of light-years away – far enough to encompass our entire galaxy and several others – the signal of a faster-than-light trip through the cosmos.

More about faster-than-light travel tomorrow.

Script by Damond Benningfield