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Scientists have observed a speed of high-energy particles through the Earth in what they hail as a major breakthrough.
The particle fell back to Earth in December 2016, exiting space at almost the speed of light. When it flew into Earth, it crashed into an electron buried in an ice cap at the South Pole – producing a particle that then disintegrated into a host of secondary particles.
These particles were captured by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a huge telescope buried beneath the surface of Antarctica.
The event captured by this equipment is known as the Glashow Resonance Event. Such events had been predicted, but never directly seen – and ultimately observation helps confirm some of the deepest foundations of particle physics, scientists say.
This is the first time that an individual neutrino has been found to be of astrophysical origin, scientists say. In this and other ways, it also shows how the IceCube equipment – made up of a series of sensors submerged under the ice – can help examine the universe.
The event takes its name from Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who predicted it would happen in 1960. In an article published during his research in Denmark, he suggested that – if conditions were exactly right – an antineutrino could interact with an electron to create particles that are still invisible, through a process called resonance.
This invisible particle was discovered in 1983 and was named the W boson. It also turned out to be much heavier than expected, meaning that its artificial production would require impossible amounts of energy: it would take a neutrino with more energy. 1000 times more powerful than that which can be produced in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
But the researchers suggested that it might be possible to use space as a vast natural accelerator. In space, there are extreme cosmic events – black holes in the midst of galaxies and similar objects – which can generate the required energy on their own.
The energetic antineutrino that passed through Earth in 2016 was likely sent to Earth by such an object, researchers said.
“When Glashow was a post-doctoral fellow at Niels Bohr, he could never have imagined that his unconventional proposal to produce the W– boson would be produced by an antineutrino from a distant galaxy crashing into Antarctic ice, ”said Francis Halzen, professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, headquarters of IceCube maintenance and operations, and principal investigator of ‘IceCube.
The research is described in an article titled “ Detection of a Glashow Resonance Particle Shower with IceCube ”, published in Nature today.
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