This is surprising: a Brazilian physicist has discovered that one of the most famous maneuvers in *Star Trek* would be even more remarkable than the series' creators imagined. According to his calculations, a spacecraft traveling faster than the speed of light could produce three apparent images of itself, completely confusing any observer.
The study was conducted by Nickolas de Aguiar Alves, a researcher at the Federal University of ABC in São Paulo. The investigation was inspired by a classic scene from *Star Trek: The Next Generation*, which originally aired in 1987. In the episode, Captain Jean-Luc Picard uses a maneuver to escape an enemy vessel: his ship accelerates beyond the speed of light, rapidly approaches the adversary, and then comes to an abrupt stop. Since the ship would have outpaced the light it previously emitted, the enemy would see two images simultaneously—one showing its former position and another indicating its actual location.
However, upon analyzing the situation mathematically, the researcher uncovered a detail the series had not accounted for: the ship does not travel at a constant speed. It first accelerates to surpass the speed of light and subsequently decelerates until it comes to a halt. These changes alter the precise moment when light emitted during different stages of the journey reaches an observer. Consequently, under certain conditions, the enemy could see as many as three images of the same ship.
The researcher also demonstrated that a maneuver involving an additional phase of superluminal speed could potentially produce up to five images. It is important to clarify that this does not mean travel faster than the speed of light has become possible; the study is a purely theoretical analysis of a fictional scenario, as, according to known physics, objects with mass cannot be accelerated to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. Nevertheless, there are phenomena in nature that share certain parallels: when charged particles move through water faster than light can propagate within that medium, they produce what is known as Cherenkov radiation—the source of the characteristic glow observed in certain nuclear reactors.
The work demonstrates how a scenario conceived in science fiction can serve to explore real problems in physics—specifically regarding motion, the propagation of light, and what an observer is capable of perceiving. In this instance, the mathematics revealed that the "Picard maneuver" could be even more confusing than it appeared on television.
