[ad_1]
Another step, perhaps the most important scientific achievement of the year, was the discovery by astronomers of the origin of so-called ghost particles: neutrinos
An IceCube, a network of 5,000 sensors a kilometer under the ice, detected a neutrino. from Antarctica to the South Pole, necessary place to isolate possible polluting sources.
This particle was emitted by a superpowered black hole, a blazar, 3,700 million light-years away from us, towards the constellation of Orion.
Detection was reported yesterday in the journal Science by a large group of researchers from various institutions. It is important because it helps to better understand the formation of particles, the basis of the current model of physics, and to understand step by step the evolution of the universe.
For decades, we sought to detect high energy neutrinos and find out where these sub-particles with energies are billions of times greater than those reached in the Large Collider of Particles. "The first challenge to detect them and study their origin is that they interact very little with matter," explains Derek Fox professor at Penn State University, co-author of the # 39; section. This has been solved with the IceCube and its detectors.
The first detection was made in 2013 and the alerts began to be distributed among the astrophysical observatories. Over the next 16 months, there were 11 neutrino alerts, but the sources were not found.
Until the so-called IceCube-170922A, a high-energy neutrino detected on September 22 at 8:54 am the night arrived. which had an energy of 300 trillion electronvolts and a trajectory marking a small sector towards Orion, explained Azadeh Keivani another of the co-authors.
"The alert was distributed in seconds the neutrino will activate an automatic X-ray sequence and ultraviolet observations with the NASA Swift Observatory, generating more studies in the space telescope Also from NASA and 13 other observatories around the planet, such as the Asas-SN network of 20 small 14-centimeter telescopes in Hawaii, Texas and Chile, which followed the sky 13 hours later having received the warning establish with the utmost precision that the neutrino originated from a flashing black hole and supermbadive, at 3,700 million light-years, known as TXS 0506 + 056, which had gained in intensity since this year.
Swift was the first to identify blazar as possible origin. "This identification opens the new field of high-energy neutrino astronomy, with which we expect major advances in the understanding of the universe and fundamental physics, including how and where these ultra-energetic particles are produced, "he said. Doug Cowen Physics professor also at Penn and another of the co-authors.
"For 20 years, one of our dreams as a collaboration was to identify the sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, and it seems we have it."
Neutrinos are part of cosmic rays from different sources. Since the rays are particles deflected by magnetic fields, it is difficult to establish their origin, nor do they interact with these fields and follow a straight line.
In another article The Astrophysical Journal, Keivani and his colleagues present the properties of this blazar, which is an active galactic nucleus (big black hole) with a relativistic jet directed almost to the Earth, this which makes it much brighter.
[ad_2]
Source link
