The universe has always been full of wonders. From starry nights to mesmerizing celestial bodies, eerily beautiful phenomenon and a lot other, always makes one curious about the many mysteries that the universe holds within itself. Years and years of research, dedication, hard work and ventures by scientists, astronomers, philosophers and others of such kind have led to the discovery of distant stars, galaxies, sounds of black hole and the list goes on. Today, men are a couple of missions away to set foot on the moon once again. Additionally, it won’t be long when man would set sail for other worlds within and outside our galaxy.
Have you wondered if travelling to other galaxies is possible? We live in the Milky Way Galaxy and our nearest galactic neighbor is the Andromeda Galaxy. Although men have never commenced a journey to a different galaxy, this hypothetical journey between galaxies is called Intergalactic travel. Even our galactic neighbor stands at millions of light years away. Apart from the distance, a plan for travelling to another galaxy would also look into the available technology. An intergalactic travel would ask for technology much more advanced than the one needed for an interstellar travel. Human has come along a way. There is enough evidence to justify that. However, humans are still far away from achieving capabilities that can facilitate intergalactic travel.
Just because the technology is not available at the moment, that does not indicate that the motive is entirely impossible. Scientists have laid out hypothetical methods and fictions for years that can possibly facilitate the motive. Let’s have a look into some of them.
The first hypothesized method involves journey of hypervelocity stars. These stars move faster than the escape velocity of the Milky Way. They travel into intergalactic space. They were observed in the year 2005 after being theorized in 1988. A scientific mechanism states that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way emits stars from the galaxy at an estimated rate of about one hundred thousand years. On deciding to achieve intergalactic travel though this method, one has to enter an orbit around them and hold until they reach another galaxy.
Another method to achieve intergalactic travel is to propel a star artificially towards the direction of another galaxy.
The next hypothesized method involves the effects of time dilation. Time dilation is time that a traveler experiences while depending on both velocity (anything less than the speed of light) and the travelled distance (length contraction). Light would require a shorter amount of time to traverse the space between Earth, from the point of view of a traveler close to the speed of light, due to time dilation affect. Thus from the point of view of a traveler, intergalactic travel is possible.
The final concept, known as the Alcubierre drive, comes in as another hypothetical concept, which converts a spacecraft’s speed to faster than light. This, according to scientists can facilitate practical intergalactic travel. Although there doesn’t exists any known way to develop a space-distorting wave, which is necessary for this concept to work, the metrics of the equation do comply with relativity and the limit of light speed.
To add on to that, there exists a hypothetical tunnel through space-time known as the wormhole. This would facilitate intergalactic travel even to the most distant galaxies which stands at billions of light years away.
