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A neutrino from a galaxy 4 billion light years away uncovers a cosmological enigma from a century ago.
For the first time in history, a team of astronomers found the origin of a high-energy cosmic neutrino. coming from outside our galaxy. The so-called "ghost particles" detected in Antarctica on September 22, 2017, reveal that he traveled 4 billion light-years to reach us and that this particle came from a blazar, a galaxy. spiral with a massive black hole in its center that rotates at high speed: extremely energetic object
This is a surprising discovery, which not only confirms the blazar as a source of high energy neutrinos, but also establishes a new field Study: multi-neutrino astrophysics messenger (use of different types of detectors together to study the same phenomenon). This same technique was used in the incredible research that confirmed and photographed collision neutron stars
Neutrinos from outside the galaxy
High energy extragalactic neutrinos were a enigmatic puzzle since their first detection in 2012. with the IceCube special neutrino detector at the South Pole, taking advantage of the Antarctic ice. Subatomic particles are rare, but they are not much rarer than neutrinos. Their mass is almost zero, they travel at almost the speed of light and do not really interact with normal matter; for them, the universe would be almost disembodied. Hence the name of "ghost particle".
The neutrinos of 2012 far outweighed any comparison: the neutrino energy was 300 teraelectronvolts, more than 100 million times more energetic or about 20 times more than the LHC, the only one in the world. the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
There are many thousands of these highly energetic objects known in the sky; but they figured at the top of the list of possible sources of high energy neutrinos
"All parts agree," concludes Albrecht Karle, physicist of UW-Madison and co-author of the published in the journal Science. "The neutrino eruption in our archive data has become an independent confirmation.With the observations of other observatories, it is convincing that this blazar is a source of extremely energetic neutrinos and, therefore, of high energy cosmic rays. "
Source: Very Interesting
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