Neutrins in ice highlight the source of cosmic radiation



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An international research team made up of researchers from, among others, Stockholm University and Uppsala University, has identified a probable source from where cosmic radiation like when the earth is formed. The discovery was made with the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole, with observations from 20 different telescopes around the world.

The results published in two articles in Science on July 13, 2018 mean that researchers were able to find an answer. Cosmic radiation is formed, which they have tried to understand since cosmic radiation was discovered in 1912.

Cosmic radiation is difficult to observe and measure: it consists of charged particles that move through a powerful magnetic field. impossible to know where it came from. With cosmic radiation, however, neutrons, uncharged massless elementary particles that can pass through space are, in principle, unaffected. And it is a neutrino, with an energy of about 300 TeV, which, with the help of the IceCube telescope on the South Pole, has been identified and traced back to its source, a blazar. A blazar is a giant elliptical galaxy with a center of a solid, fast-rotating black hole called TXS 0506 + 056 and located about 4 billion light-years from the ground.

– Last September, IceCube captured a neutrino with very high energy and other alarmed telescopes. At the same time, NASA's Fermi satellite and the MAGIC telescope in the Canary Islands saw an active galactic eruption up to several billion light-years away in the same direction as the neutrino, Chad Finley says. Physics, Stockholm University

. facilitated the analysis of IceCube's previous data and found dozens of neutrons from the same direction. They are therefore further evidence that there is a link between high energy enrichers and this active galaxy.

– Blazars – and more generally active galaxies – seem to act as the most extreme particle accelerators in nature, he says.

IceCube
IceCube is a neutrino telescope located a few kilometers on the ice of the South Pole and funded by the National Science Foundation of the US State, but also by Germany, Sweden and Belgium and seven other countries. Swedish funding comes from the Swedish Research Council. The collaboration includes 320 researchers from nearly 50 institutions around the world. The University of Stockholm, along with the University of Uppsala and three other universities, founded the South Pole's first neutrino telescope in 1992.

About the l & # 39; study
The findings are published in the scientific journal Science by an international research team including Chad Finley of Stockholm University and Olga Botner of Uppsala University. Further information on the study and copies of the articles are available at http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/sci.

Presskontakt
Chad Finley, Associate Professor of Physics , Stockholm University, Tel: +46 8 555 87 87 57 (related to mobile), e-mail: [email protected]. Answers preferably in English, but questions written in Swedish are passing well

Press service of Stockholm University, phone 08-16 40 90, email [email protected]

Photos Press and films
IceQube

Interview filmed with Chad Finley

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