A simple observation of an extremely dim star may point to, literally, the biggest manifestation of weird quantum phenomena yet. Light from a lonely neutron star 400 light-years away is polarized, just like light reflecting off a pond, a team of astronomers reports. This suggests that, as predicted, the neutron star's ultraintense magnetic field is distorting empty space through a quantum mechanical effect involving ghostly “virtual” particles lurking in the vacuum—the sort of thing usually seen only on the atomic scale.
“It’s really cool,” says Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who predicted the astrophysical effect in 2000 but was not involved in the current work. “This is a macroscopic manifestation of quantum field,” adds Jeremy Heyl, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who, along with Shaviv, made the prediction. “It’s manifest on the scale of a neutron star.”
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