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An artist’s impression of the magnetar 4U 0142+61. In May 2022, the IXPE satellite had hinted at vacuum birefringence around this dead star.
| Photo Credit: NASA
Quantum physics has made numerous strange predictions, and scientists have checked and confirmed many of them. But one of the strangest ones persists unresolved. In the 1930s, the German physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler proposed that empty space is not really empty. Instead, they predicted that in the presence of a magnetic field, the vacuum of space would behave like a crystal, changing the properties of light passing through it.
The trouble with testing this prediction — called vacuum birefringence — is that the magnetic field has to be extraordinarily strong.
In a study published in Nature on August 5, astronomers from Australia, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, and the U.S. reported it had observed such birefringence using two satellites and a telescope in Australia, almost confirming the prediction at long last.
The work could prove ‘nothingness’ is actually a complex and active medium and also potentially help scientists refine their maps of the universe.
