Connect with us

Sci/Tech

Ultra-Fast Space Travel Possible After Scientists Discover Interplanetary Super-Highways

Posted

(

)

A A A
  • Researchers reveal that there is “a connected series of arches inside space manifolds” that can be found on the asteroid belt to Uranus and goes beyond.
  • They believe that these arches can shorten space travel to a mere decade as opposed to hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
  • Such a route can be used to send spacecrafts to large astronomical distances in a very short period of time.
  • They also added that these manifolds in space affect the Jupiter-family comets or comets that have an orbital period of 20 years.

Given that travelling to different parts of the Solar System takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years, scientists would give anything to make space travel shorter. Now they have recently discovered “super-highways” in space that can actually make this possible.

A study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers from the University of California San Diego reveal that there is “a connected series of arches inside space manifolds” that can be found on the asteroid belt to Uranus and goes beyond.

They called these arches as “celestial autobahn” or “celestial highway.” The scientists believe that these arches can shorten the time it takes to travel to a mere decade (which is a really short time in terms of space travel) as compared to hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

Maps are released showing the super-highway between the outer edge of the main asteroid belt at 3 AU – that is three times the distance between the Sun and thee Earth – to just beyond Uranus at 20 AU.

Another is a dynamical map of a zoomed-in portion of the image above and another made using the same orbit, showing some of the paths and structures hidden within space flinging objects.

Like Logo on Facebook

The researchers claim that the highway can make a spacecraft cover 100 astronomical units (about 150 million kilometres) in less than a century. They mentioned that the most prominent of these arches are linked to Jupiter and its strong gravitational forces.

They also added that these manifolds in space affect the Jupiter-family comets or comets that have an orbital period of 20 years. They also control the Centaurs (small-size solar system bodies) on “unprecedented time scales.”

There is also a map of the superhighway structures surrounding Jupiter, which are concentrated on highly chaotic structure within the arches.

A release by UC San Diego News Centre mentions that “Some of these bodies will end up colliding with Jupiter or being ejected from the Solar System.” Scientists used the numerical data about millions of orbits in our Solar System to resolve the structures and then they computed how the orbits within the space manifolds that are already known.

At this point, the scientists still don’t know how these space manifolds will react near Earth. It is assumed that the manifolds will control the meteorite and asteroid reaching Earth. They may even control the man-made objects in the Earth-Moon system. The way the reactions will happen is something that scientists have yet to find out.

View Comments

Popular