from the very-tiny-thing-going-really-REALLY-fast dept.
A 4 Billion Light-Year Journey Ends At The South Pole
Scientists for the first time have been able to pinpoint the source of an extremely powerful version of a neutrino, a ghostly particle that can travel virtually unimpeded through space. It's an achievement that opens a whole new way of looking at the universe. The neutrino was detected by a South Pole observatory called IceCube that was specifically designed to catch the particles. It consists of a cubic kilometer of ice festooned with more than 5,000 detectors.
[...] This time, as Botner and her colleagues report [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat1378] [DX] in the journal Science, two observatories, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescope, saw a burst of gamma energy coming from the same location as the neutrino. Gamma rays are the kind of radiation one would expect to see from an object generating neutrinos. The object, known colloquially as TXS 0506+056, was something called a blazar approximately 4 billion light-years from Earth. "Blazars are very special objects," Botner says. "They are intensely bright galaxies harboring a black hole at the center."
To confirm that TXS 0506+056 was indeed the source of the single energetic neutrino detected in September, Botner and her colleagues went back through nearly a decade of data IceCube had collected. They found that other energetic neutrinos had been detected from the same location but had not been previously associated with a celestial object. Those results appear in a second Science paper [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat2890] [DX].
Wikipedia entry on blazar:
A blazar is a very compact quasar (quasi-stellar radio source) associated with a presumed supermassive black hole at the center of an active, giant elliptical galaxy. Blazars are among the most energetic phenomena in the universe and are an important topic in extragalactic astronomy.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @03:47PM (3 children)
Go ahead; put my rhymes on trial
Cast you off into exile
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @11:46PM
Planetary intergalactic
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 14 2018, @01:47PM
You dumb AC rapper, you can't fuck with the master
I'll run through ya faster than a gamma ray, bastard
flipping your bits, probably causing you cancer
Lyrically raping your anus, like the soylent spammer
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 14 2018, @08:34PM
IceCube knows which joint the blazars at
IceCube 'scopes, points interphasers at
Neutrino made no force, still snapped 'em
IceCube nails the source, distilled fat datum
(Score: 4, Interesting) by BenJeremy on Friday July 13 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
The neutrino is still chugging along in space, after it passed through the earth. The only thing "captured" is the effects of the neutrino passing through.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday July 13 2018, @09:37PM
The few that got detected didn't move on. They changed into muons and left a trace to be detected by the observatory.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @04:47PM
Today was a good day.