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

Researchers have discovered a space manifold that can act as a superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than previously thought.

Image of the heart of nearby active galaxy IC 5063 reveals a mixture of bright rays and dark shadows. (Image: NASA/ Hubble Space Telescope)

The scientists believe that such a route can be used to send spacecrafts to large astronomical distances in a very short time, just as they act on asteroids and comets.

Published in the journal Science Advances, the study by researchers from UC San Diego mentions a connected series of arches inside space manifolds that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond.

Deeming it a "celestial autobahn," or celestial highway, it is believed to cut short the time to travel such a distance to a mere decade, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions of years. The authors claim that the route can enable a travel across 100 astronomical units (about 150 million kilometres) in less than a century.

(Representational Image: NASA)

In their research, the authors highlight that the most prominent arch structures are linked to Jupiter and its strong gravitational forces. The paper mentions that such manifolds in space control the Jupiter-family comets or comets that have an orbital period of 20 years as well as Centaurs (small-size solar system bodies) on ¡°unprecedented time scales.¡±

¡°Some of these bodies will end up colliding with Jupiter or being ejected from the Solar System,¡± a release by UC San Diego News Centre mentions. Scientists resolved the structures through the numerical data about millions of orbits in our Solar System. They then computed how these orbits fit within the already-known space manifolds.

It is yet unknown as to how these space manifolds will react near Earth. They are sure to control the asteroid and meteorite reaching Earth, or even the man-made objects in the Earth-Moon system. But the way in which they will react is yet unclear. A deeper study into the same can also provide a possible way of using these space manifolds to send space probes into the deep ends of our solar system.