Scientists using data from a detector embedded in a huge block of ice at the South Pole have traced an eerie and elusive particle back to one of the most powerful objects in existence. In the process, they’ve unlocked a whole new way to look at the universe.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica in September detected a neutrino, which is a rather wild subatomic particle that travels near the speed of light and passes right through almost anything in its path like a ghost. The observatory almost instantly triggered an alert for other telescopes to check certain coordinates for a possible source.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) Telescope in the Canary Islands both identified the same source of the wayward high-power particle: a flare of high-energy cosmic rays shooting into space from a distant supermassive black hole, a powerful phenomenon also known as a blazar.
This particular blazar is named TXS 0506+056 and located about 4 billion light-years from Earth in a galaxy that’s not visible with the naked eye but is in the direction of the constellation Orion.
“What’s special … is we are in the beam. It is pointing at us,” said senior IceCube scientist Albrecht Karle in a news release on Monday.
This is the first time a neutrino has been traced back to its source, and it’s a big deal because it represents a new, third way for scientists to observe and measure the universe.
Up until just a few years ago, we spent centuries seeing the cosmos using only light in all its forms, from radio waves to the visible spectrum on up to X-rays and gamma rays. In 2015, scientists made the Nobel Prize-winning detection of gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein. This allows us to not only see distant objects across space, but to also “feel” the vibrations sent in our direction by massive cosmic events. Scientists call this “multi-messenger astronomy.”
Neutrinos now provide us with a third, more spooky way of observing the universe because they are neither light nor gravitational waves, but something else, almost a sort of extra-sensory perception for astrophysicists, for lack of a better metaphor.
