Every time you take a step, space itself glows with a soft warmth.
Called the Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect (or sometimes just Unruh effect if you’re pushed for time), this eerie glow of radiation emerging from the vacuum is akin to the mysterious Hawking radiation that’s thought to surround black holes.
Only in this case, it’s the product of acceleration rather than gravity.
Can’t feel it? There’s a good reason for that. You’d need to move at an impossible speed to sense even the weakest of Unruh rays.
For now, the effect remains a purely theoretical phenomenon, far beyond our ability to measure. But that could soon change, following a discovery by researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).