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For the first time, a team of astronomers found the origin of a neutrino cosmic outside the Milky Way. The "ghost particle" detected in Antarctica reveals that, apart from neutrinos, gamma rays are partially produced by high-energy protons in supermassive black-hole jets
It arrived at the IceCube observatory (a neutrino telescope) located in Antarctica, an experiment that has laid the first concrete answer to one of the cosmological enigmas that has lasted for more than a century: neutrinos can accelerate up to speed of light thanks to a special type of compact galactic center called blazar It is thought that the Blazars are powered by supermassive black holes, one of the most energetic phenomena observed in the universe.
The origin of the particle, detected on September 22, 2017, is a surprising discovery, since it not only confirms blazars as a source of high energy neutrinos, but also establishes a new field of interest. study, something like astrophysics of multi-messenger neutrinos: the use of different types of detectors gathered to study the same phenomenon.
is that high-energy extragalactic neutrinos have been a puzzle since their first detection in 2012, thanks to the special IceCube neutrino detector at the South Pole, taking advantage of the Antarctic ice.
Subatomic particles are rare, but they are not as big as neutrinos. Their mass is almost zero, they travel almost at the speed of light, and they do not really interact with normal matter. For a neutrino, the Universe would be almost disembodied. In fact, billions of neutrinos are approaching us right now. That's why we call them the "ghost particle".
However, that does not mean that they can not interact with the material, and that is what the IceCube experiment is all about. Sometimes a neutrino can interact with the ice and create a flash of light. In this way, IceCube detectors penetrate the Antarctic ice where, in the dark, they can detect the photons of these collisions.
Up until now, IceCube had detected several neutrinos that really stood out. They are much more energetic than normal detections, which indicates that at first sight they had to travel a very long distance. The neutrino energy of September was not one of the highest, at 300 teraelectronvolts, but it far exceeded anything in the vicinity. And since the rest of the Universe does not actually exist for neutrinos, it means that they always travel in a straight line.
This is precisely how researchers have discovered from where this came small subatomic particle. Their analysis dates back to a 4 billion-year-old blazar called TXS 0506 + 056, right next to Orion, a finding that means the associated high-energy cosmic rays (consisting primarily of protons and atomic nuclei) also come from the same place.
Essentially, a blazar is a type of quasar, a galaxy with a supermassive black hole active in its nucleus that sends a tremendous energy while it is feeding, and one of the jets that gushes out of the polar regions of the hole black point directly in our direction.
The researchers say that when real-time detection was done in 2017, scientists were put on alert. They quickly began browsing IceCube data and found a rocket of more than a dozen neutrinos from the end of 2014 to the beginning of 2015.
Then, the discovery was confirmed by two telescopes from the lightning. gamma: the Fermi Gamma Ray space telescope in NASA's orbit and the Cherenkov telescope (MAGIC) in the Canary Islands. Both have detected a flash of high energy gamma ray activity of TXS 0506 + 056.
A pioneering work that indicated that the blazar is now the first accelerator of neutrinos and cosmic high-energy rays known. [Motherboard, Science]
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