NASA's IXPE Studies Magnetar

Scientists utilizing NASA's IXPE conducted over 140 hours of observations of the magnetar 1E 1547-5408 between March and April 2025. These measurements, published Wednesday in Nature, may have captured empty space behaving in a manner that physicists have predicted for 90 years but had never directly observed. This first-of-its-kind study represents a significant milestone in astrophysics, providing direct evidence of vacuum behavior as predicted by theoretical physics through the analysis of X-ray polarimetry data.