{"id":842577,"date":"2026-09-10T05:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T05:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/842577\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T05:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T05:32:11","slug":"this-photon-survived-an-impossible-journey-to-earth-to-explain-it-physicists-had-to-break-einstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/842577\/","title":{"rendered":"This Photon Survived an ‘Impossible’ Journey to Earth. To Explain it, Physicists Had to Break Einstein"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2022, astronomers detected an absurdly bright and long-lasting gamma ray burst, GRB 221009A<\/a>\u2014nicknamed \u201cBOAT,\u201d for \u201cBrightest of All Time\u201d (seriously). The shower of photons was so old and powerful that, theoretically, it shouldn\u2019t have reached Earth. And yet, it clearly has. But how?<\/p>\n

In a paper<\/a> published yesterday in Physical Review Letters, a pair of physicists offer a puzzling solution to a puzzling problem: hypothetical particles from the cosmic dawn. Specifically, the researchers propose that photons could temporarily transform into axion-like particles, which are extremely light, paired with a separate tweak to account for photon behavior at extreme energies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this second piece that technically violates something called Lorentz invariance<\/a>, a key tenant of Einstein\u2019s special relativity. But here\u2019s the thing\u2014using this model, the pair predicted a secondary effect that would arise from the photon\u2019s journey. And, it turns out, a completely unrelated observatory actually had observed exactly this. In other words, there\u2019s actually empirical support for this theory.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started from a very simple question: how did this photon survive a journey that, according to known physics, should have destroyed it?\u201d Giorgio Galanti, the study\u2019s co-author and an astrophysicist at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cWe therefore looked for a theoretical scenario capable of consistently describing what we observe, without resorting to arbitrary corrections to the equations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018B.O.A.T.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Because GRB 221009A was so powerful, it \u201ctemporarily blinded most space-based gamma-ray instruments,\u201d according to a NASA explainer<\/a>\u2014hence the nickname, \u201cBOAT.\u201d But the signal was also exceptionally long, at about 10 minutes. The flash remained detectable for the next 10 hours, and soon astronomers were able to lock down some key statistics of the BOAT.<\/p>\n

\"NasaA chart comparing the strength of GRB 221009A against other signals that previously set records for exceptional luminosity. Credit: NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and Adam Goldstein (USRA) <\/p>\n

Originating roughly two billion light-years from Earth, it exerted energies around 300 teraelectronvolts (TeV). For context, 1 electronvolt is the kinetic energy of 1 electron in a 1-volt vacuum; 1 teraelectronvolt is equivalent to 1 trillion electronvolts. At the time, experts with NASA surmised<\/a> that the burst of light came from the birth of a new black hole, and subsequent investigations of the signal deemed that such luminous events would occur once in every 10,000 years.<\/p>\n

A broken signal? \"NasaThe afterglow of the gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A captured by Swift\u2019s X-Ray Telescope. Credit: NASA\/Swift\/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester) <\/p>\n

Then, astronomers had to reckon with the elephant in the room: the logistics of GRB 221009A\u2019s journey to Earth. In the paper, Galanti and co-author Marco Roncadelli, of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, explained that GRB 221009A was \u201cin tension\u201d with conventional physics. According to the physics rulebook, photons at similar energy levels should have collided with the cosmic microwave background\u2014traces of radiation from the universe\u2019s earliest days\u2014and been annihilated in the process.<\/p>\n

In the statement, the team likened this to \u201cshooting an arrow through an extremely dense forest stretching for two billion light-years and expecting it not to hit a single tree.\u201d So, if the signal got here\u2014and we know it did\u2014the photons must have found a way either to dodge all of these trees or disregard them altogether.<\/p>\n

The pair believes the answer is the latter. Some models of quantum gravity allow for slight flexibility in one of the fundamental rules of Einstein\u2019s special relativity for matter at the highest energy levels. The pair coupled this mechanism with axion-like particles. As a result, what you get are what the researchers call the universe\u2019s \u201cfast lane,\u201d through which super light, very powerful particles zip through obstacles as if they didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

Cheat code <\/p>\n

Understandably, this might sound like an ad hoc solution to the problem; after all, it\u2019s not like we have concrete proof that axion-like particles exist. The team recognized this in the paper, explaining that its proposal is just one out of many ideas to probe this unexplained signal. That said, the latest calculations predicted a one-hour gap between a shower of lower-energy photons and the 300 TeV photon\u2019s arrival on Earth. And, remarkably, this was precisely what one Chinese observatory caught at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most interesting aspect of our work is that, for the first time, it brings together two ideas that until now had been developed separately,\u201d Roncadelli said in the statement. \u201cIf future observations confirmed this scenario, the universe would become a natural laboratory for studying quantum gravity at energies enormously higher than those achievable by any accelerator built on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2022, astronomers detected an absurdly bright and long-lasting gamma ray burst, GRB 221009A\u2014nicknamed \u201cBOAT,\u201d for \u201cBrightest of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":842578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[8149,58136,79],"class_list":["post-842577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astrophysics","tag-gamma-rays","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/842578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}