Thursday, July 7, 2011

Distant light hints at size of space-time grains - space - 07 July 2011 - New Scientist

Distant light hints at size of space-time grains: terrestrial telescopes... have seen low-energy photons from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) arriving before their high-energy counterparts. While this could be due to delays in emission at the source, it could also be caused by the interaction of photons with the structure of space-time...
Now a team has used data from the Integral satellite, run by the European Space Agency (ESA), to study an entirely different effect: the polarisation of light of different energies from a GRB...
this puts an important limit on the size of the grains of space-time. According to an ESA press release, it means they must be smaller than 10-48 metres, many orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length of 10-35 metres, the universe's smallest length scale...

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