Wormhole travel as envisioned by Les Bossinas for NASA. (Les Bossinas (Cortez III Service Corp.), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

To allow the Star Trek characters to quickly reach any part of the universe, Star Trek introduced the concept of "warp speed," which lets the starships travel faster than light. However, according to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, it is impossible to go faster than light.

Then is it never possible to use warp drive? Scientists seem to have found a viable solution, at least theoretically.

In a new study, physicist Erik Lentz from Göttingen University in Germany proposed a model for faster-than-light travel, thanks to what he calls a new class of hyper-fast solitons. They are a kind of wave that maintains its shape and energy and can move at a constant faster-than-light velocity.

According to Lentz's model, these hyper-fast soliton solutions can exist within the framework of general relativity.

With a sufficient energy supply, these solitons can be configured as "warp bubbles" with faster-than-light speeds, thus theoretically enabling an object to travel through spacetime without suffering from extreme tidal forces.