Since I’ve pointed out interesting newsletter issue numbers recently, here’s another: 766 is the sum of twelve — twelve! — consecutive prime numbers: 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71 + 73 + 79 + 83 + 89 = 766. Cooool. #dork

Sometimes science has to tiptoe around goofiness.

Science is a process, not a compendium of facts, and a way of investigating the world using observation, evidence, and supposition. There are plenty of places where it can go wrong, but that last one can really go off the rails. 

I enjoy a bit of speculation, and I even like it when scientists go a bit outside the zone of provable data to guess a bit on what might be the mechanism behind their observations. This can push our understanding, encourage new ways of thinking about a topic, and sometimes — sometimes — it even proves to be correct.

You have to be careful not to overstep, though, and stray into territory that’s too shaky to be of any use. For example, when speculating we sometimes say you’re allowed one tooth fairy — a step in your thinking process where you can invoke “magic”, basically saying “what if this happens” without providing a lot of evidence for it — but not two.

On the other hand, sometimes topics can be weird and borderline science fiction but still give insight… and may even be fun.

So with all that said, in July a team of scientists published a study examining the effects of warp bubble collapse on the generation of gravitational waves. 

No, I’m not kidding, and I kinda love this work [link to journal article]. And yes, we’re talking about what happens when a starship falls out of warp (or when a warp core breaches and fails). But then, I’m a massive Star Trek dork.

The idea is actually pretty grounded in science. Gravitational waves are firm science now: the ripples in spacetime created when a massive object is accelerated. They were only theory — the last untested prediction of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity — until 2015, when the first ones were detected by LIGO coming from merging black holes.

Any accelerating mass makes gravitational waves, but the higher the acceleration and the more massive an object, the easier they are to detect, which is why black holes spiraling together at the speed of light are the best targets.

Here’s the fun bit: warp bubbles can be mathematically modeled using relativity as well. The idea in Trek is that the warp drive (technically an Alcubierre Drive) compresses space in front of it and expands space behind it, basically allowing a ship to travel more rapidly, even faster than light; you never go faster than light inside that space bubble, but outside observers see you going FTL. This is all highly theoretical of course, and no one really knows how (or if) it can be implemented in reality. Not-so-shockingly the details are highly complex, but the math is sound enough.

So the team of scientists decided to take a look and find out what happens if a collapsing warp bubble — the region of compressed and rarefied space — can generate gravitational waves and what they’d look like if detected. What they found is actually pretty cool: the waves created (assuming a bubble 1 km in size) are too high in frequency for current detectors to see, but the power of the signal is actually detectable within current capabilities. So if we built detectors with the sensitivity of LIGO but tuned to higher frequencies, we could in theory detect a starship’s warp bubble shutting down as far out as 3 million light-years. Many galaxies are within that distance, including the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies (and the Pegasus Dwarf Irregular galaxy is at the upper distance limit, too, if I may mix franchises). 

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