SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
This diagram represents the the light of a neutron star passing through an area of space where vacuum birefringence, a theory of quantum electrodynamics, is occurring. The light's magnetic and electric fields (red and blue arrows) are altered and aligned as they pass through the empty space near a neutron star, suggesting the intense magnetic field there creates virtual particles that affect the light.
About 400 light-years from here, in the area surrounding a neutron star, the electromagnetic field of this unbelievably dense object appears to be creating an area where matter spontaneously appears and then vanishes.
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) describes the relationships between particles of light, or photons, and electrically charged particles such as electrons and protons. The theories of QED suggest that the universe is full of "virtual particles," which are not really particles at all. They are fluctuations in quantum fields that have most of the same properties as particles, except they appear and vanish all the time. Scientists predicted the existence of virtual particles some 80 years ago, but we have never had experimental evidence of this process until now.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday December 14 2016, @12:17AM
The headline is misleading, virtual particles are already well-established in quantum theory, and there is already considerable evidence for their existence, such as the Casimir effect. This is just one more piece of such evidence.
Also, according to current theory, gravity doesn't directly effect light at all, other than the fact that a photon's straight-line path appears to curve as it follows the spatial deformations. I believe there is no known mechanism by which it could alter the polarization of light, which normally only happens when photons interact with matter.
Moreover, if it *was* gravity doing it, then the results would likely look far different as gravity is a unipolar force that propagates uniformly in all directions (neglecting frame dragging, which is considerably more complicated), unlike the heavily directionality of a bipolar force such as magnetism.