Physicists just witnessed pinpricks of darkness moving faster than the speed of light — without breaking the laws of relativity
For the first time, researchers have detected voids moving faster than the speed of light – and they exceeded this cosmic speed limit without breaking the laws of relativity.
A recent study shows the acceleration of voids. The researchers used recent advances in ultrafast electron microscopy to measure voids in phonon-polariton waves zooming inside a thin flake of boron nitride. Phonon-polaritons are quasiparticles formed of photons (quantized light) coupled with tiny vibrations, and they act as combined light and sound waves.
Sometimes the waves cancel each other out, creating points where the wave magnitude drops to zero. In a lake, this would create a temporary whirlpool (a vortex) that moves around this empty point, also called a singularity. These singularities are found throughout nature and mathematics and, since the 1970s, they have been theorized to move faster than the speed of light in some cases, according to a recent statement from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
Exceeding the limit
Einstein’s special theory relativity states that the speed of light in a vacuum – 299,792,458 meters per second, or approximately 186,000 miles per second – is the fastest speed at which information, matter and energy can travel through space. So how do singularities move faster than the speed of light? Because singularities are empty points of nothingness, they contain no information, no matter, and no energy. They are tiny voids, so they don’t have to obey the cosmic speed limit.
These voids don’t just exceed the speed of light: they exceed it. When two singularities meet, they can sometimes accelerate exponentially toward each other until their speeds approach infinity just before canceling out. However, the faster they go, the more difficult it is to observe them. The recent study, published March 25 in the journal Natureshows that researchers are doing just that.
“Our discovery reveals universal laws of nature shared by all types of waves, from sound waves and fluid flows to complex systems such as superconductors,” Ido Kaminerprofessor of electrical and computer engineering at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and member of the research team, said in the release.
The study’s results don’t just apply to small eddies; null points act enough like particles that scientists can study them to better understand interactions between particles. To do this, researchers need to know where the comparison fails. The new study shows that voids’ need for speed is a point where singularities stop acting like particles, since particles obey the cosmic speed limit that voids ignore.
Additionally, the new techniques used by the team to observe very small and very fast objects could shed light on previously unexplored pockets in several scientific disciplines.
“We believe that these innovative microscopy techniques will enable the study of hidden processes in physics, chemistry and biology, revealing for the first time how nature behaves in its fastest and most elusive moments,” Kaminer added.
Bucher, T., Gorlach, A., Niedermayr, A., Yan, Q., Nahari, H., Wang, K., Ruimy, R., Adiv, Y., Yannai, M., Abudi, TL, Janzen, E., Spaegele, C., Roques-Carmes, C., Edgar, JH, Koppens, FHL, Vanacore, GM, Sheinfux, HH, Tsesses, S. and Kaminer, I. (2026). Superluminal correlations in sets of optical phase singularities. Nature651(8107), 920-926. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10209-z
