Scientists Teleported Light for the First Time in History, Say It Could Done Across Galaxies

Since the dawn of astronomy, light has been our time machine. What we see in the night sky is not just stars, it’s ancient history, covered in photons travelling hundreds of millions or even billions of years to reach us. These photons, moving at an unfathomable 300,000 kilometers per second, carry the tales of galaxies long gone, telling us how the cosmos was born and how it evolved. For generations, the limits of the speed of light have stood as an unbreakable wall between science fiction and reality. But what if that barrier is finally cracking? In a stunning feat, experts have teleported light for the first time in human history, forging a quantum entanglement between particles and maintaining it for more than 30 hours, a world record literally, as per The Pulse.

This was not a single lab trick. The entangled photons were transmitted over an actual optical fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, involving researchers from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Lab, and EPB of Chattanooga. By using a process called automatic polarization compensation (APC), the team ensured that environmental disruptions did not break the quantum link. To grasp the scale of this achievement, you need to understand what quantum entanglement entails, as per The Pulse.

When two photons are entangled, any tiny change in one is mirrored quickly in the other, no matter the distance. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” But, surprisingly, its implications are anything but spooky; they are revolutionary. In this case, entangled photons were kept in sync for over a day, a duration far beyond any previous experiment. Though the distance covered was just half a mile, the potential was something else. Teleportation of information across galaxies could become a reality in the near future. But while the quantum frontier is being revamped, the classical one still surprises us. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently spotted JADES-GS-z13-1, a galaxy that emitted light just 330 million years after the Big Bang, piercing the early universe’s fog of neutral hydrogen with a Lyman-alpha emission—a wavelength rarely seen so early in cosmic history, as per Discover Magazine.

Co-author Kevin Hainline noted, “We really shouldn’t have found a galaxy like this, given our understanding of the way the universe has evolved…We could think of the early universe as shrouded with a thick fog that would make it exceedingly difficult to find even powerful lighthouses peeking through, yet here we see the beam of light from this galaxy piercing the veil,” as per the University of Cambridge.

The JWST’s detection of this ultraviolet radiation from such an ancient galaxy is causing scientists to rethink their models of early star formation and reionization—the process by which the early universe became transparent. Some theorists suggest that this could be the work of the universe’s first generation of stars, or perhaps a supermassive black hole lighting up the galactic core, as per Discover Magazine.