Neutron Star May Reveal First Evidence of 80-Year-Old Quantum Prediction
In 1930, physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler predicted that very strong magnetic fields could change the polarity of light waves in a vacuum (where polarity refers to the orientation of the light's electric and magnetic fields). This effect, which they dubbed "vacuum birefringence," is not predicted by classical physics. Now, scientists using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) say they may have observed this effect in the light coming from a neutron star— a cosmic object with a very strong magnetic field.
