Warp drive inside a black hole: what would happen?

The concept of warp drive is widely explored in science fiction, such as the Star Wars and Star Trek series, where characters use this technology to achieve ultra-fast travel between distant regions of the universe.

According to a recent study published in the scientific journal Physical Letters B, a team of scientists Remo Garattini and Kirill Zatrimaylov He asked what would happen if the warp drive passed through a black hole.

Theoretically, any living creature entering a black hole would spaghetti-form and die within seconds. The same would apply to the equipment and instruments of a spacecraft, which would be destroyed by the gravitational pull of the black hole. However, Researchers say using warp drive could prevent it from being completely destroyed.

As the researchers explain, the ship will not only need to be equipped with a space warp engine, but will also need to cross the event horizon region at a speed slower than the speed of light. The event horizon is a boundary around a black hole beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational pull. Once you cross this horizon, the laws of physics as we know them will “stop working.”

“As the warp drive crosses the black hole horizon at sublight speed, we find that the horizon is virtually absent inside the warp bubble. Furthermore, we find that the gravitational field of the black hole can mitigate violations of the weak energy state (WEC) and zero energy state (NEC), thereby reducing the amount of negative energy required to sustain a warp drive. Microscopic warp drives in laboratory experiments,” the study describes.

Warp drive in a black hole

To conduct the research, scientists used the Schwarzschild black hole as an example, as it represents the simplest model derived from Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity.

They combined the mathematical knowledge about the black hole and the warp drive and found that the black hole positively affects the drive’s operation. In some way, the engine uses the black hole’s negative energy to power the ride.

With this possibility, spacecraft could theoretically pass through a black hole and come out “the other side” without being destroyed by its intense gravitational pull. The study also suggests that based on this new idea, scientists could develop mini warp drives in a test environment. It is worth noting that no real warp drive technology exists to date.

“Similarly, when there is a larger warp bubble passing through a black hole, this will create a ‘cloaking’ effect and effectively remove the horizon, making it impossible to define the entropy of the black hole in Hawking’s understanding. If warp drives are possible in nature, these questions raise questions that we do not yet understand them from a thermodynamic perspective,” the study concludes.

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