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A new era of special research opens this Thursday (12). This is because an international team of astronomers has discovered the source of high-energy neutrinos found at the South Pole – and this mysterious particle opens up an opportunity to tell the story and tell the story. illuminate the puzzles of the Universe itself.
The discovery is in the fifth issue of Science magazine and was published at a press conference at the National Science Foundation's headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.
"High energy neutrinos really provide us with a new window to observe the Universe," says physicist Darren Grant of the University of Alberta in an interview with BBC News Brazil.
Grant is one of more than 300 researchers from 49 IceCube Collaboration Group institutions – responsible for discovery. "The properties of neutrinos make it an almost ideal astrophysical messenger: as they travel virtually unimpeded from their point of production, when they are detected, we can badyze that they were carrying information about their origin."
Neutrinos are elementary subatomic particles, which means that there is no evidence that they can be divided into smaller parts. They are emitted by stellar bursts and move almost at the speed of light.
Installed at the South Pole and in operation since 2010, the IceCube is considered the largest telescope in the world – it measures one cubic kilometer. It took ten years to build and lies under the Antarctic ice.
The IceCube consists of a set of more than 5,000 light sensors arranged in a grid and buried in ice. It's a scientific nonsense. When neutrinos interact with ice, they produce particles that generate blue light – and the device can then detect them. At the same time, ice has the property of working as a sort of net, isolating neutrinos, facilitating their observation.
The particle is the secret of the universe
From the conception of the project, the scientists had the intention of precisely monitoring these particles to discover their origin. The idea is that it gives clues about the origin of the Universe itself. And that is precisely what they have come to accomplish.
Researchers already know that the origin of neutrinos observed in Antarctica is a blazar, that is, a highly energetic celestial body badociated with a black hole in the center of a galaxy. This celestial body is located 3.7 billion light years from Earth in the Constellation of Orion.
"Here's the main conclusion," says Grant. "These are the first high-energy neutrino media observations that coincide with an astrophysical source, in this case a blazar.This is the first evidence of a source of high-energy neutrinos. also the first convincing evidence of an identified source of cosmic rays. "
/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_59edd422c0c84a879bd37670ae4f538a/internal_photos /bs/2018/K/D/TN2ykTTMqcRdEF7T0uUA/2.jpg "Spectroscopie nucléaire et les rayons X et les ultraviolets ont été utilisés pour identifier l'origine de la particule (Photo: Penn State University / Amon / Nate Follmer)")
Nuclear Spectroscopy and X-ray and Ultra-Radiation Observations As the physicist has said, the novelty is the introduction, in the field of astronomy, of a new ability to "see" the universe (Photo: Penn State University / Amon / Nate Follmer). . "This is the first concrete step towards the use of neutrinos as a tool to visualize the most extreme astrophysical processes in the universe," Grant explains.
"As this field of research continues to develop, we must also learn the mechanisms that drive these particles, and one day we will begin to study this fundamental particle of nature in some of the most extreme energies imaginable, well at beyond that we can produce on Earth. "
" This identification launches a new field of high-energy neutrino astronomy, and we hope it will bring exciting advances in our understanding of the world. " Universe and physics, including how and where these ultra-high energy particles are produced "astrophysicist Doug Cowen of Penn State University. "For 20 years, one of our dreams was to identify the sources of high energy cosmic neutrinos, and we finally managed to do it.
For decades, astronomers around the world have sought to detect high energy cosmic neutrinos in failed attempts to understand where and how these subatomic particles are generated with energies thousands and millions of times greater than those of the planet. Earth
The IceCube was able to detect neutrinos of the type for the first time in 2013. Since then, alerts have been circulated to the scientific community with each new discovery. The key particle, however, only came on September 22, 2017: the neutrino named IceCube-170922A, with the impressive energy of 300 trillion electron volts, showed scientists a trajectory.
"Pointing to a small corner of the sky in the constellation of Orion," reports Azadeh Keivani of Penn State University, co-author of the article published by Science. As soon as the particle was identified, in a coordinated and automated manner, fourteen other observatories around the world began to work together to identify its origin, with nuclear spectroscopy and X-ray and ultraviolet observations.
All data generated was badyzed by the international group of scientists until the conclusion that the source was the supermbadive black hole 3.7 billion light years from Earth.
This distance from the planet means that the information carried by the neutrino is 3.7 billion years ago, baduming that it traveled at the speed of light. At this point, understanding such properties amounts to looking at the confines of the past of the Universe – it is now thought that the Big Bang took place 13.8 billion years ago.
After completing the origin of the IceCube-170922A neutrino, scientists scanned the data stored by the neutrino detector and concluded that 12 other neutrinos identified between 2014 and 2015 also came from the same blazar. In other words, it is possible to compare particles of the same origin, thus increasing the consistency of the sample.
According to IceCube scientists, this detection unquestionably ushered in the so-called "multimedia astronomy", which combines traditional astronomy – in which the data depend on the action of light – with new tools such as neutrino or gravitational waves.
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