The researchers followed a single particle that traveled in space for more than 3.8 billion years

Although you can not recognize it, it feels it or sees it, there are absolutely incredible numbers of neutrinos around you and in you all the time.

These are particles that go through space at the speed of light. so much of them that it is not possible to visualize it. Every second, about 65 billion neutrinos cross every inch of your body.

As said, difficult to treat. But there are a lot of difficult things with neutrinos. They are so difficult to measure that scientists do not know where the vast majority comes from.

Up to now, only two known astronomical sources of neutrinos are: our own sun, and a massive explosion of stars, which the researchers presented in this research article in 1987.

But now, it may have been discovered a source, according to a new study in the journal Science. Due to a single neutrino that was measured under the ice of the South Pole.

The source is most likely an explosion, a huge black hole that sends extremely high energy particles, but later in the case

– For us your neutrino fans are so great, "says Jostein Riiser Kristiansen at research.no. He is an astrophysicist and associate professor at OsloMet

But to understand what that means, we need to take a closer look at what neutrinos really are for something.

Pellets in atomic nuclei

It is actually in the name. The neutrino is almost completely neutral to all the other things in the universe. There is no electrical charge, and scientists have long thought that there was no mass, but that turned out to be wrong.

The Nørtrino has an intact mass, and the researchers behind the discovery were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015. But the particle of the special features does not collide with almost anything – almost

The overwhelming majority of neutrinos continue in a straight line from their source without ever affecting or being influenced by other particles or forces in the universe. It also means that neutrinos can say something about the source from which they come, several billion years after it is sent

– other electrically charged particles will be affected, for example, by magnetic fields and will twist. When they come to the ground, it's not good to say which direction they really come from, says Kristiansen

– Part of what you want to accomplish with neutrino observation is to better understand the sources and where they are formed. You can find a lot of different high energy particles and we want to understand where they come from.

But how to connect a neutrino to a source? First, the neutrino must be discovered, which poses challenges when most neutrinos go on regardless of what is in front of them

Once upon a time there was a neutrino colliding with an atomic nucleus. But as it happens so rarely, you should measure it on a large surface.

One cubic kilometer of ice

There are several observatories whose only task is to search for neutrinoins on Earth, but the IceCube of the South Pole seems particularly strange.

It is there that this special neutrino was recorded on September 22, 2017. It was observed in a detector composed of more than 5000 sensors located deep in the ice, spread over one cubic mile of ice.

The sensors are at a depth between 1450 and 2450 meters, and they are looking for a very bright light in the ice. If you do not need to know more about neutrino detection, skip to the next section, but it's a fun story.

When a neutrino seldom collides with an atomic nucleus, the other charged particles will come out of this collision. These particles have a terrible speed, actually faster than light.

Well, no faster than the speed of light in the void, which is the absolute speed limit of the universe, as far as we know it. But particles move faster than light enters ice, because the speed of light is influenced by the material into which it enters.

These particles create a distinct form of light called radiation tsjerenkov. This is well known in nuclear reactors, and in the video below you can see how the glow looks like a reactor during testing. The light comes from the charged particles of the reactor that move faster than the speed of light in the water.

These are the traces of light that all sensors under the ice seek. They can pick up a tsjarkkov race track that shows in which direction the neutrino has moved, which also indicates something about the amount of energy that it carries.

But even though the neutrino is extremely difficult to detect, there are so many According to the website of the IceCube project, there are about 275 neutrinos per day in such a detection zone

So, what was the particularity of this neutrino? Direction and Energy

Neutrino Binding to a Specific Source

– When the detector finds a high energy neutrino, there is a notice for professionals who can search for the source, "says Riiser Kristiansen, who works with the Fermi space telescope, a space telescope searching for radiation sources over a large part of the starry sky

– The other teams have managed to connect this neutrino to a particular source, a blower, says Riiser Kristiansen. When it was recorded, other teams could start looking in the direction from where it came in. Several large research groups have been involved in this work, and they are thinking of pointing to a billion-dollar blower. Light years from us

This blaser varies in brightness, sometimes it is weak, sometimes strong, and this neutral plug is coupled

Blasher is a giant black hole

– A blister is really a giant black hole in the middle of a galaxy because it's a swirling disc around the material.

This disk rotates rapidly around the black hole, and all the sulamite emits a jet of particles and energy. It is there that this neutrino could occur, with billions of other neutrinos.

When this jet-stream points directly to the ground, it is called a blower.

Jostein Riiser Kristiansen describes what really happened here in a very good way:

– It 's like an extraordinary rap of this galaxy core, so that' s it. is a very big rap of this galaxy Do you end up with that single neutrino that breaks in an atom on the south pole of the earth?

Riiser Kristiansen also points out that this neutrino comes from the north of the equator, so it crossed a good part of the globe before it was recorded. IceCube

Uncertainties

There are some uncertainties in the measurements. This is only one neutrino, and the researchers think that it's very likely that it comes from the blaser, which has not yet got its own name, but which one's own. Calls TXS 0506 + 056.

The researchers also read the archives of the IceCube project. , and they want to show that this blaser is a potential source of several other high-energy neutrino recordings that have been made over the past decade.

– But they can not guarantee that it comes from there, says Riiser Kristiansen

but this finding is an example of what is called multimessenger astronomy. The same object, such as a blower, can provide different information through, for example, electromagnetic radiation and detectable neutrinos on the ground.

The same goes for gravitational waves. We can read more about it.

Some researchers compare this by combining different sensory impressions, such as vision or hearing, for a better understanding of the phenomena in the universe, according to Space.com.

:

Collaboration Ice Cube: neutrino emission of blazar direction TXS 0506 + 056 before IceCube-170922A alert. Science, 2018. DOI: 10.1126 / science.aat289. Abstract

D. Grant: Several sightings of a flared blazar coincide with the high-energy IceCube-170922A neutrino. Science, 2018. DOI: 10.1126 / science.aat1378. Summary