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Today, scientists have made an important announcement: telescopes around the world have registered a ray source mysterious and ultra-energetic, most energetic cosmic that hit the Earth. It all started with a text message.
The recent discovery has, at least partially, solved a century-old mystery: the identity of a space object that could possibly send particles with energies a billion times higher than the particles produced by the Large Hadron Collider. The answer was more or less what the scientists predicted, but finding the answer was a huge feat that required international coordination. It was based on a global notification system used in case of incredible space events. It was a feat of this new era of "multimessenger astronomy."
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"We are lucky to live in a time when we can make discoveries that would have been impossible just ten years ago", France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, told Gizmodo in an e-mail.
Multimessenger astronomy means exactly what she says: astronomy that uses information conveyed by several types of messengers. "Light", or electromagnetic radiation, takes many forms, such as gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet rays, visible light, infrared, microwave and radio waves . This has traditionally been the only tool of astronomers to scrutinize the cosmos, but light alone can only tell us the same thing. The discovery today adds a second "messenger" to the toolbox: a very high energy neutrino. Like light, neutrinos can travel in a straight line across the Universe without being curved by magnetic fields, but only one high energy neutrino that has triggered the announcement today. added information, since only the mysterious and ultra-energetic cosmic rays could have produced
The IceCube Neutrino Ice Observatory has located and calculated the path taken by the neutrino on 22 September 2017, and his computers immediately realized that the detection was remarkable.
"IceCube decides what is worth sending," said Anna Franckowiak, researcher at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Germany, Gizmodo. "We only send the most interesting events, which usually means that it is high energy events. This means that there is a high probability that it's really a cosmic neutrino, and it's not just a neutrino produced in the atmosphere. "
The experiment sent a notice on the Gamma-Ray Coordinate Network (GCN) 43 seconds later to receive these alerts. Four hours later, a more detailed message was broadcast on the same network. Circulars and notifications can either come immediately on the networks, or can come a few seconds after their emission by text message or by email. The second alert stated:
On September 22, 2017, IceCube detected a runway type event, of very high energy, with a high probability of being of astrophysical origin. The event was identified by the Extremely Energetic Track Event (EHE) selection. The IceCube detector was in a normal operating state. EHE events typically have a neutrino interaction peak that lies outside the detector, produce a muon that passes through the detector's volume, and have a high light level (an indicator of energy ).
After the initial automatic alert, more sophisticated reconstruction algorithms were applied offline, with the refined direction for:
Date: 22 Sep, 2017
Time: 20: 54: 30.43 UTC
RA: 77.43 deg (-0.80 deg / + 1.30 deg 90% PSF confinement) J2000
Dec: 5.72 deg (-0.40 deg / + 0.70 deg 90% PSF confinement) J2000
We encourage follow-up by the ground and space instruments to help identify a possible astrophysical source for the candidate neutrino.
Shortly thereafter, a few observatories, including the ANTARES neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean, the MAGIC telescopes in the Canaries, the high-energy stereoscopic system (HESS) in Namibia, and the Swift X-ray telescope in orbit around the land, tracking with varying levels of success, by posting update notices of their own.
The moment of eureka came on September 28, when scientists realized that the Fermi big-box telescope, which probes gamma rays, found a potential source in their catalog corresponding to the direction of the The arrival of the neutrino. This source was a blazar, the supermassive black hole that spewed particles in the center of galaxy TXS 0506 + 056. They published an astronomer telegram documenting the source. Others began to observe the black hole based on this information, thus completing the story of multimessenger.
If this story sounds familiar, it's quite similar to what happened during the first discovery of two colliding neutron stars, which was announced with great fanfare last October. Gravitational wave observatories like LIGO also issue GCN alerts, but observatories must sign a contract to view them.
This type of multimessenger science is very new. After the SN 1987A supernova of 1987, it may be only the third major discovery of multimessenger, after the colliding neutron stars. It took a lot of work to get to this point.
"These unlikely impacts are what we are focusing on today, but think of all that the research community had to do to make neutrino detection possible," said Córdova. "We had to build a facility at the South Pole and equip it with incredibly sensitive instruments. We had to connect this facility to global satellites. And hundreds of scientists have had to work for years, building on decades of discoveries made by other researchers. "
Multimedia astrophysics is a" big idea "that will guide the long-term plan of the National Science Foundation, and it hopes to see more multimessenger proposals from the astrophysics community." But in addition to the proposals we need funds, "said Vladimir Papitashvili, director of the NSF program in Gizmodo," There is no way around the problem, the government is helping to finance these big projects. "
But for We have the GCN and the astronomer telegram connecting telescopes and observatories around the world, sending texts and emails to get the most exciting things going on in astronomy.
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