One of the main obstacles to intergalactic travel is distance: these are figures so high that at the speed that human ships can now reach, it would take decades, if not centuries, to reach the nearest star. Unless we would have another type of “engine”. And that is what he proposes a recent study published in Arxiv.
According to the authors, led by Clèment Vidal, if an advanced alien civilization wanted to travel the galaxythe best way to do this is by directing your binary star system. Civilizations can have many motivations for wanting to move to another place in the galaxy: escaping a supernova, resource scarcity, climate change.
However, given the enormous distances between stars, interstellar travel is tremendously difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, Instead of abandoning their system, what Vidal proposes is that they take it with themusing the star as a motor.
The main advantage of accelerating your own star would be that you could keep it with you while you travel. They would do this by having their star radiate or evaporate in a single direction, which would propel the star, along with all its planets, to a new location in the galaxy. Astronomers have investigated whether “hypervelocity” stars (which, as their name suggests, are stars with extraordinarily high speed) may have been deliberately launched by extraterrestrial civilizations.
In the study, the Vida team points out that most stars are not solitary, but belong to binary systems (it is estimated that 85%). This means that binary systems offer many advantages over their solitary counterparts.
Vidal took a model system that consists of a neutron star with a low-mass star orbiting closely around it. This configuration provides the greatest flexibility in steering and thrust capabilities.
The extraterrestrial civilization would have to find a way to eject material from the star. This could be from asymmetric magnetic fields or some device that causes uneven heating on the stellar surface. Be that as it may, The goal would be to get the star to expel more material in one direction than the other.. This would create thrust that would propel the binary system in the opposite direction, like releasing air from a balloon.
If civilization placed the machinery on or near the neutron star, where strong gravity could provide an available power source, they could steer the binary system by carefully turning the machine off and on. For example, if they activated the machine only at the exact same point in the orbit, would send the binary system in one direction. If they left the machine on a little longer, they would adjust their course, pointing their motion in any direction they wanted along the orbital plane.
They could even steer their system in new directions outside of orbit, altering the direction in which your machine was pointingeffectively changing the neutron star’s orbit around its companion.
Surprisingly, there are real systems in the universe that meet these types of characteristics, such as the “black widow” pulsar PSR J0610-2100 and the “redback” pulsar PSR J2043+1711. Both systems have significant accelerations. “Although it is unlikely that are caused by extraterrestrial engineering, they are worth investigating – Vidal concludes -. At least, as long as they continue to exist.”