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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

A 4 Billion Light-Year Journey Ends At The South Pole [npr.org]

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 [wisc.edu] 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 [sciencemag.org] [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat1378] [DX [doi.org]] in the journal Science, two observatories, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope [nasa.gov] and the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescope [www.ifae.es], 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 [sciencemag.org] [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat2890] [DX [doi.org]].

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