MessageToEagle.com - It would seem the strange world of space-time surprises us once again.

Last month, scientists discovered that shockwaves could crinkle space-time creating a new kind of singularity.

This was great discovery because not only did physicists demonstrate that space-time cannot be locally flat at a point where two shock waves collide, but it was also the beginning o what is now called " new kind of singularity in general relativity."

Now, after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that were recorded by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009, scientists have made a new surprising discovery that suggests space-time is not a bubbly as previously thought.

The photons originated about 7 billion light years away from Earth in one of three pulses from a gamma-ray burst. They arrived at the orbiting telescope just one millisecond apart, in a virtual tie.

Some theories of quantum gravity say that the universe is not smooth but foamy -- made of fundamental units called Planck lengths that are less than a trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Planck lengths are so small that there's no way to detect them, except via photons like those that make up gamma-ray bursts.

Scientists have discovered space-time is not as bubbly as they previosuly thought.

Here's why. The wavelengths of these photons are some of the shortest distances known to science -- so short they should interact with the even smaller Planck length. And if they interact, the photons should be dispersed -- scattered -- on their trek through Planck length-pixelated spacetime.

In particular, they should disperse in different ways if their wavelengths differ, just as a ping pong ball and a softball might take alternate paths down a gravely hillside.

You wouldn't notice the scattering over short distances, but across billions of light years, the Planck lengths should disperse the light. And three photons from the same gamma-ray burst should not have crashed through the Fermi telescope at the same moment.

But they did, and that calls into question just how foamy spacetime really is. "We have shown that the universe is smooth across the Planck mass," Nemiroff said. "That means that there's no choppiness that's detectable. It's a really cool discovery. We're very excited."

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