Scientists achieved a feat that sounds almost divine: creating light out of nothing. Researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, managed to capture photons, the most basic component of light, within a dark vacuum.

Physicist Christopher Wilson and colleagues capitalized on a property of vacuums little-known outside the world of physics: absolute emptiness does not exist and instead what seems like nothing contains fleeting virtual particles.

The researchers used tools to get the virtual particles to come into the real world and create light, a feat they said took little energy.

"Relatively little energy is therefore required in order to excite them out of their virtual state," Göran Johansson, theoretical physicist and study author, said in a statement. "In principle, one could also create other particles from vacuum, such as electrons or protons, but that would require a lot more energy."

This idea of virtual particles is called the Casimir effect. In 1970, the physicist Gerald Moore paved the groundwork for the current experiment by stating that if virtual photons were made to bounce of a mirror that moved at a speed that is nearly equivalent to the speed of light, then the photon's will become real photon's by leaving their virtual state.

Scientists haven't been able to observe the dynamic Casimir effect before because there was no way of speeding a mirror to near light speed. The Chalmers scientists were able to devise an alternate way of sending those light particles to approach the speed of light.

"Since it's not possible to get a mirror to move fast enough, we've developed another method for achieving the same effect," Per Delsing, experimental physics professor said in a statement. "Instead of varying the physical distance to a mirror, we've varied the electrical distance to an electrical short circuit that acts as a mirror for microwaves."

The "mirror" was made to vibrate at a speed of up to 25 percent the speed of light which was enough for the virtual photons to appear from the vacuum. The scientists were able to measure their microwave radiation thus establishing that these photons had the same properties that quantum physics predicted they would.

The scientists believe that the experiment can be useful for further research in quantum computer development and that these "vacuum fluctuations" can be linked to the "dark energy" that controls the expansions of the universe.

The researchers published their work Wednesday in the journal Nature.