'I had heard many times that faster-than-light motion result in backwards time travel,' Robert Nemiroff, a physicist at Michigan Technological University told DailyMail.com
'Even though I am a professional astrophysicist, I didn't understand the details of how this might work.
'So a student and I tried to work out for ourselves a very simple example.'
The example involved a spaceship that would start on a launching pad on Earth, travel at five times the speed of light to a planet about 10 light-years away.
It would then turn around to return home to a landing pad not far from the lift-off site, according to a report in LiveScience.
'It is well known - and not controversial - that you can time travel to the future by just travelling quickly in a spaceship and coming back,' said Professor Nemiroff.
'The closer one goes to the speed of light, and the longer the trip, the further into the future you can go.
'But what about the past? Can you get to the past simply by just travelling in a spaceship?'
The only way this could happen was to assume that the spaceship could travel faster than the speed of light, and return.
'Although in retrospect the equations were simple, it took us quite some effort to figure out how this might work,' said Professor Nemiroff.
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