The super galaxy firing gusts of neutrinos to the Earth

Did you know that every second your body is traversed by about 200 trillion subatomic particles?

However, and contrary to what the film 2012 put it, these particles, called neutrinos, are not dangerous can not "mutate" before overheating the center of the Earth. Like a quantum machine gun, the Sun constantly throws neutrino jets, an elementary particle without charge, so small and so light (it has less than a billionth of a proton's mbad), very hard to detect. , and also it hardly interacts with matter (although if it strikes a proton directly, it produces a neutron and a positron, but this hardly ever happens). That's why they are harmless and are called the "ghost particle".

There are three types (or "flavors" as they are called in physics) of neutrinos: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tauonic neutrino (and there is also its antiparticle: the antineutrino, but this is Is another story). The Sun produces only the first taste, electronic neutrinos. These are formed by the nuclear fusion reactions that occur at the center of our star (when the hydrogen atoms fuse to become helium) and spurt out, at speeds close to light, in crossing everything in its path, as if it did not exist.

To detect them, underground facilities, such as IceCube, are used in Antarctica. The sensitive photodetectors of the IceCube are up to 2,500 meters below the surface of the frozen continent. Because? Because it is necessary to avoid other interferences, such as cosmic rays. At this depth, only neutrinos could interact with the detectors.

In addition, neutrinos have been found to "oscillate", that is, they can change their taste almost randomly. Neutrinos are not only produced in stars: also in nuclear power plants, in particle accelerators (like CERN), in supernovae and, as recently detected, in particle jets. The merit of this discovery, the muon neutrino captured in Antarctica, is that telescopes were used to detect its origin: it was known that the small neutrino had traveled 4 billion light-years from a colossal black hole , in the center of a gigantic galaxy (which draws its shards of particles directly on Earth), the blazar TXS 0506 + 056, located in the constellation of Ori n "

" This is the first proof we have of An active galaxy emitting neutrinos, which means that we can soon begin to observe the cosmos using neutrinos to learn more about these objects. Sinc Agency told one of the co-authors of the discovery, Marcos Santander, a professor at the University of Alabama. This is what is called "multimensajero astronomy", which involves the collaboration of scientists from around the world in real time. Something similar to what happened last year, when the gravitational waves emitted by a kilonova with observatories and multiple instruments were detected.

These data and observations provide valuable information on the Sun, on the formation of supernovae, cosmic rays. cosmic background radiation and dark matter. In other words, they help us to better understand the universe in which we live and which we can not see with the naked eye, although it affects our existence.