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Extragalactic neutrinos cross the entire universe – but where do these ghost particles come from? Now, researchers have discovered their origin: they are created in the accelerators of cosmic particles.
No less than four different publications in the journals "Science" and "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society" report today this discovery – probably a sign that researchers IceCube collaboration, because a very special catch is entry into the detector network. Trapped was a neutrino, also known as ghost particles. Neutrinos are ghostly in that they normally go through the room without being noticed.
"When a high-energy neutrino hits the human body, we do not feel anything," says David Paneque of the Max Planck Society. Institute of Physics. "In neutrino detectors, neutrinos appear indirectly: by interacting with an atomic nucleus, a muon emerges and, in turn, light is the signal we measure."
Every second, about 60 billion of these elementary particles hit the surface of our thumbnail – and gently pierce it. That we do not notice any of this is because these particles interact with normal matter as well as virtually no interaction. At best, they get noticed when they hit an atomic nucleus with extreme precision. And it is extremely unlikely
Alarm on the South Pole
But sometimes it happens. On September 22, 2017, the underground meters of the IceCube Observatory near the South Pole hit. A shower of cosmic neutrinos crashed into the ice block of a cubic kilometer. One of them has proved extremely energetic, with 300 trillion electron-volts indicating the instruments – almost 50 times more than the large CERN particle accelerator can produce.
IceCube / NSF
The IceCube Observatory in Antarctica has the largest particle detector in the world
From the signal, researchers have First, it reconstructs the trajectory that the neutrino had taken in space. Then an "astronomer telegram" was sent to fellow specialists on every continent, asking them to look for conspicuous signals in that direction.
One was found quickly: The Fermi-LAT space telescope made several projections in the trajectory Billions of light-years away, it is a supermbadive black hole that absorbs matter and accelerates or heats it to such an extent that a grouped beam of particles and radiation propagates in space. Blazars call these astrophysicists cosmic particle accelerators.
Measurements of MAGIC telescopes on the Canary Island of La Palma confirm: The radiation of the Blazar TXS 0506 + 056 in the constellation of Orion has exactly the right energy for the neutrino. The neutrino measured at the South Pole most likely comes from there. When the particle made its journey into space about 3.8 billion years ago, the first primitive forms of life were created on Earth.
One of the great mysteries of astrophysics has been solved. And a second in the same way: up to now, it was not clear exactly where the cosmic rays discovered more than 100 years ago came from.
DESY, Science Communication Lab
Blazar: A jet escapes from the Klaus Helbing Center of the University of Wuppertal, member of the University of Wuppertal. research team of 300 members, explains that the "normal" cosmic radiation, that is to say not quite energetic, "comes from the supernova explosions of our galaxy". "But there are also actions that reach energy orders several orders of magnitude higher than the neutrino currently discovered.We are talking about ten trillion electron-volts."
The researchers found that neutrinos are apparently descendants of extremely accelerated protons. This suggests that even the high-energy cosmic rays of blazars are fired in space.
Another unresolved mystery
A big question remains to be solved: why do neutrinos have a tiny mbad of rest, but still existing? can not be explained with the conventional theory, the standard model
Here too, the hopes rest on IceCube: If a particle of time was lost in the detector block shortly after the Big Bang, the theorists could be the Saint Grail. particle physics point: to the grand unified theory, which unites all the natural forces of the universe.
Robert Czepel, science.ORF.at
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