An experiment built in a vast slab of Antarctic ice recently doubled its count of "cosmic neutrinos" from outer space, by searching for arrivals passing through the planet from the north. The same team this week announced the highest-energy neutrino ever detected.
They have evidence for a neutrino arriving with at least 2,600 trillion electronvolts (teraelectronvolts, TeV) of energy - hundreds of times more than protons inside the Large Hadron Collider, even after its historic revamp.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 08 2015, @04:28PM
Well, it doesn't just say that neutrinos can go at such high energies (that indeed has been "known" — that is, it is what current theories predict), it says that there are neutrinos that do go at such high energies, which is interesting because this means there must be processes in the universe that give such an energy to a single neutrino.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:31PM
Given that a small particle accelerator can do this, is it surprising that things like supernova can too? The orders of magnitude we deal with even in specialist places on Earth are unbelievably small compared to anything out there in the depths of space.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:47PM
Please show me the particle accelerator that can produce 2600 TeV neutrinos.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.