LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves

If aliens were to make spacecraft as massive as Jupiter or ones that use warp drives, we might be able to detect them using the ripples they produce in space-time

By Leah Crane

We may be able to spot enormous alien spacecraft by the gravitational waves they would create. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time formed when a massive object moves around, so if there are any extraterrestrials driving gigantic spacecraft around our galaxy, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US could potentially detect them.

Gianni Martire at Applied Physics, a research institute in New York, and his colleagues calculated how large such a craft would have to be, and how fast it would have …