If they don't panic and do something stupid, like shut down their biofield, the ship that dissappeared at the edge of their solar system will eventually find themselves on the outskirts of another solar system some lightyears away. They have become the first of their people to use the Stargate system of travel.
Most systems with habitable planets have warp points commonly called Stargates which allows a properly equipped ship to travel between systems very quickly. Relative speed of a ship in a gate warp is 10,000 times the speed of light, allowing a trip of 10 Ly in 8 1/3 hours as we tell time here on Earth. Since these gates are always a light-day from a system's center of gravity and since non-gated ships can only move a maximum speed of about .4 c, 4/10ths of the speed of light, cross system travel may take far longer than interstellar travel in most cases. Gate-to-gate travel across a system will take several days while travel between the stars may only take hours.
Faster-than-light travel without use of the stargates is theoretically possible and some races may have such technology, but it is tremendously expensive to develop and will be fraught with terrible mishaps. With the stargates, the need for such technology is limited to that of cross-system travel and possibly journeys to the few ungated systems that may harbor life. There has never been a gate disappear once it has shown itself so stargates are reliable in addition to being free, fast and relatively safe.
Stargates are always found on a direct line between the two star systems at each end but while this may seem to make locating them easy, it is not quite that simple. A gate may simply appear one day. They may be created anew or they may have been dormant until they appear. Nobody knows whether these gates are a natural phenomenon or artificial constructs and the reasons for their appearance are a complete mystery, though it is always heralded by sudden electromagnetic pulses at each end of the gate. Similar pulses can tell one that an object is en route and if the source system can be determined, an approximate time of arrival can be calculated.
Everything leaves gate at the same speed it enters, dead slow to very fast. Relative speed of gate travel is along the lines of 10,000 times the speed of light and nothing can affect the rate of travel, though lack of the biofield will prevent access to the gate and losing it in transit will cause the ship to disappear en route. When this happens, a much larger pulse is experienced at each end of the warp. It is not enough energy to account for a total conversion of mass to energy so what exactly happens to anything lost in transit is a mystery. Some spacers believe that the crew of a ship that disappears this way is lost forever, their souls adrift in some hyperspace dimension. It is an end that is greatly feared.
Passage through the stargates can be made in both directions at once and while a ship passing through the warp cannot see or scan anything in or out of warp beyond their biofield, an observer aboard the ship will see what appears to be a long, ribbed, grey tube that they seem to be passing through. Neither energy nor matter can leave the biofield and survive so there is no way to light up the inside of the warp or approach the "walls" of the tube. The speculation is that there is no tube structure at all but that this is the warp effect itself that the mind perceives in this way. The "ribs" are literally the folding of space-time around the transiting ship.
