Astronomers directly detect interstellar turbulence warping distant quasar light

Across ten billion light-years, a quasar's radio signal arrives at Earth not as it was sent, but as the galaxy has shaped it — bent and scattered by the churning ionized gas between stars. For the first time, astronomers led by Alexander Plavin at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have not merely inferred this distortion but directly observed its internal architecture, revealing that interstellar turbulence is not a formless blur but a structured, textured phenomenon. Using nearly a decade of observations from the Very Long Baseline Array, the team has opened a new way of readi