Speed

Traveling Faster Than the Speed of Light: Two Baylor Physicists Have a New Idea That Could Make It Happen

Aug. 11, 2008

by Matt Pene

Two Baylor University scientists have come up with a new method to cause a spaceship to effectively travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.

Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy, a Baylor graduate student, theorize that by manipulating the extra spatial dimensions of string theory around a spaceship with an extremely large amount of energy, it would create a "bubble" that could cause the ship to travel faster than the speed of light. To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 10th spatial dimension would alter the dark energy in three large spatial dimensions: height, width and length. Cleaver said positive dark energy is currently responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.

"Think of it like a surfer riding a wave," said Cleaver, who co-authored the paper with Obousy about the new method. "The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light."

The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in a bubble between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light.

String theory suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. Height, width and length are three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. String theorists use to believe that there were a total of 10 dimensions, with six other dimensions that we can not yet identify because of their incredibly small size. A new theory, called M-theory, takes string theory one step farther and states that the "strings" that all things are made of actually vibrate in an additional spatial dimensional, which is called the 10th dimension. It is by changing the size of this 10th spatial dimension that Baylor researchers believe could alter the strength of the dark energy in such a manner to propel a ship faster than the speed of light.

The Baylor physicists estimate that the amount of energy needed to influence the extra dimension is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into pure energy for a ship measuring roughly 10 meters by 10 meters by 10 meters.

"That is an enormous amount of energy," Cleaver said. "We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy."

The paper appears in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

The full paper can be viewed here.

For more information, contact Dr. Cleaver at (254) 710-2283.

Black holes

Black holes 'dodge middle ground'

For black holes, there appears to be very little room for mediocrity, astronomers have found.

A study suggests they come in either small or large sizes, but medium-sized ones are very rare or non-existent.

A team of astronomers has examined one of the best hiding places for a middleweight black hole, and found that it cannot possibly host one.

Details of the research are to be published in the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

If a medium black hole existed in a cluster, it would either swallow little black holes or kick them out of the cluster Daniel Stern, JPL

Black holes are incredibly dense points of matter, whose gravity prevents even light from escaping.

The least massive black holes known are about 10 times the mass of our Sun and form when colossal stars explode as supernovas.

The heftiest black holes are billions of times the mass of the Sun and lie deep in the bellies of almost all galaxies.

That leaves black holes of intermediate mass, which were thought to be buried at the cores of globular clusters.

Full of stars

Globular clusters are dense collections of millions of stars, which reside within galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars.

Theorists argue that these clusters should have a scaled-down version of a galactic black hole. Such objects would be about 1,000 to 10,000 times the mass of the Sun - medium-sized as far as black holes are concerned.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Stephen Zepf of Michigan State University, East Lansing, has carried out a detailed examination of a globular cluster called RZ2109.

The researchers' work led them to the conclusion that it could not possess a medium-sized black hole.

"Some theories say that small black holes in globular clusters should sink down to the centre and form a medium-sized one, but our discovery suggests this isn't true," said co-author Daniel Stern of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

In a previous study, Dr Zepf and his colleagues looked for evidence of a black hole in RZ2109, located 50 million light-years away in a nearby galaxy.

Elusive quarry

Using the European Space Agency's (Esa) XMM-Newton telescope, they discovered the telltale X-ray signature of an active, or "feeding", black hole. But, at that point, they still didn't know its size.

Stephen Zepf and Daniel Stern then teamed up with other researchers to obtain a chemical fingerprint, called a spectrum, of the globular cluster, using the WM Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The spectrum revealed that the black hole is petite, with roughly 10 times the mass of the Sun.

According to theory, a cluster with a small black hole cannot have a medium one, too.

"If a medium black hole existed in a cluster, it would either swallow little black holes or kick them out of the cluster," said Dr Stern. In other words, the small black hole in RZ2109 rules out the possibility of a medium one being there, too.

The study does not quite represent the end of the road for medium-sized black holes.

Zepf said it was possible such objects were hiding in the outskirts of galaxies like our Milky Way, either in surrounding "dwarf galaxies" or in the remnants of dwarf galaxies being swallowed by a bigger one.

If so, he said, the black holes would be faint and difficult to find.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/7573364.stm

Published: 2008/08/20 22:30:54 GMT