The Santander San Rafael Marcos was part of a historical discovery

A great discovery was presented this week by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States and published in two articles in the journal Science, on a fact that helps to solve a centennial mystery about the origin of the cosmic rays, namely, highly energetic particles that continually bombard the Earth from space. The transcendental fact has also been reproduced by many international media such as CNN or the Washington Post.
San Marcos de Santander Santander, a professor at the University of Alabama, United States, is one of the co-authors of the discovery. He explained that "cosmic rays have an electrical charge and their trajectories are deflected by magnetic fields, so that when they reach the Earth, they do not" point "towards the source that emitted them. This means that, although we have known the existence of cosmic rays for over 100 years, we still do not know where they come from. "
Thus, after decades of searching for where the cosmic rays were born, neutrinos and the most energetic cosmic rays of the universe, scientists have finally found an object that produces them. "One way to solve this problem is to use neutrinos because they are produced once cosmic rays interact with the gases or photons on their trajectory." Since neutrinos are neutral particles, their path does not matter. is not affected by magnetic fields and if we detect a neutrino source, as we now have evidence, we can conclude that it is also a source of cosmic rays. "
Santander points out that the discovery opens the door to the use of neutrinos in the observation of the universe. "We are starting to do astronomy using other means than light, combining electromagnetic observations (obtained with optical telescopes, radio telescopes, X-rays, etc.) with other measurements. in what we now call multimensajero astronomy.This is the first evidence that we have an active neutrino-emitting galaxy, which means that we can soon begin to observe the cosmos using neutrinos to learn more about these objects in a way that would be impossible with light alone. "

is a neutrino?
Our universe is infused with neutrinos, so called because they are unloaded (or neutral) and infinitesimally weak (about one millionth of the mass of an electron). They are created in nuclear reactions, in power plants, in the center of the sun and in the midst of even more extreme events, as the protons accelerate, collide, and turn into a shower of energetic particles. Neutrinos are the second most abundant type of particle in the universe after photons, which are light particles.