Probing spacetime foam with extragalactic sources

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect spacetime foam through observations of distant quasars, suggesting that current and upcoming telescopes could reveal quantum spacetime fluctuations and provide insights into dark energy and matter.

Contribution

It introduces a novel observational approach to probe quantum spacetime foam using extragalactic sources, linking astrophysical data to fundamental physics and cosmology.

Findings

VLTI could soon detect spacetime foam effects

Method can infer dark energy/matter properties independently

Potential to test quantum gravity theories observationally

Abstract

Due to quantum fluctuations, spacetime is probably ``foamy'' on very small scales. We propose to detect this texture of spacetime foam by looking for core-halo structures in the images of distant quasars. We find that the Very Large Telescope interferometer will be on the verge of being able to probe the fabric of spacetime when it reaches its design performance. Our method also allows us to use spacetime foam physics and physics of computation to infer the existence of dark energy/matter, independent of the evidence from recent cosmological observations.