The idea that it may be possible to penetrate the “Romulan invisibility cloak” has received a boost.
Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “invisibility cloaks” may have left marks on our sky.
This “Romulan presence” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.
The preliminary work, to be published in Unphysical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.
For now, the team has worked with seven years’ worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the faint glow left from our Universe’s formation.
‘Mind-blowing’
The theory that invokes these Romulan cloaks – a theory formally called “warp drive” – holds that as interstellar spacecraft pop into and out of the galaxy using this method, they leave telltale effects on space time.
Hiranya Peerless, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when a spacecraft pinches off spacetime in its warp drive, which is very similar to the process that makes baby universes only smaller, it may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.