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ScienceSurprise 5/5Difficulty 4/5Reviewed on September 13, 2026

A vacuum can change the way light travels when subjected to extreme magnetic fields.

Why it is true

An international team used observations of a magnetar, a neutron star with a magnetic field billions of times stronger than Earth's, to confirm a 90-year-old prediction of quantum electrodynamics. The effect, called vacuum birefringence, causes light to polarize in different ways when passing through a vacuum under intense magnetic fields.

Source: Nature

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