Could 'Ghost Particle' Neutrinos Crashing Into Antarctica Change Astronomy Forever? (cnet.com) 29
CNET reports on how research in Antarctica "could change astronomy forever":
About 47 million light-years from where you're sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 is spitting out streams of enigmatic particles. These "neutrinos" are also known as the elusive "ghost particles" that haunt our universe but leave little trace of their existence.... Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. When any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube stands ready.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 "high-energy neutrino emissions" coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. "Neutrino astronomy," scientists call it.
It'd be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.
Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet's atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube's first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056. With this newfound neutrino source, we're entering a new era of the particle's story. In fact, according to the research team, it's likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can't tell....
Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn't even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe's backstage. They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we're unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.... Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.
The team says their data can provide information on two great unsolved mysteries in astronomy: why black holes emit sporadic blasts of light, and neutrinos' suspected role in the origin of cosmic rays.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 "high-energy neutrino emissions" coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. "Neutrino astronomy," scientists call it.
It'd be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.
Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet's atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube's first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056. With this newfound neutrino source, we're entering a new era of the particle's story. In fact, according to the research team, it's likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can't tell....
Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn't even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe's backstage. They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we're unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.... Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.
The team says their data can provide information on two great unsolved mysteries in astronomy: why black holes emit sporadic blasts of light, and neutrinos' suspected role in the origin of cosmic rays.
mechanism (Score:5, Insightful)
>a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay
That's... you know what, never mind
Re: (Score:2)
I came here to say the same thing. Not sure why your score is 0, but you're right: radioactive decay is by definition not chemistry. It is, however, a form of alchemy.
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Really? You should notify the Nobel Committee because they awarded the Chemistry Nobel to people who studied radiation like Rutherford, Marie Curie (and her daughter), and also Otto Hahn (who discovered fission.)
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*tears section on radioactive decay and how it interacts with chemistry out of book*
We keep forgetting that Chemistry doesnt use any physics, and we'll never find the philosophers stone if we keep up with this newfangled delusion.
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'Nuf said I think.
It just gets worse by the minute (Score:2)
NYU used to be a pretty good school.
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Well lets see. She HAS a degree in Physics and Chemistry, and she used the correct terminology, mostly (The Beta decay process is part of Nuclear Chemistry since it involves Nuclear Transmutation).
Whats your objection dude?
Sadly Lots of Errors (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it's nuclear decay, not a chemical one because it's the nucleus, not the electrons that change and anyone with a degree in science, let alone one that mentions physics and chemistry should know that: indeed school kids know this! She fails to mention that neutrinos have also been produced by particle decay in accelerators which is important since it is actually how two flavours of neutrinos were discovered.
The high energy of the neutrinos we observed from TXS0106+056 and NGC1068 is "jaw-dropping" because of the huge energies involved - the highest energy neutrinos we have seen are hundreds to thousands of times the energies of protons in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. At these insane energies, the "ghostly bits" are actually a lot less "ghostly" to the extent where we look for high energy neutrinos (100's of TeV to PeV - protons in the LHC are 7 TeV) near the horizon because at these energies the Earth will start to block neutrinos.
This is an exciting result because it's the birth of a new field of neutrino astronomy where we can look at the universe very differently to the way we have before and, historically, when we have done that we have also learnt a lot. However, it also gives us sources of extremely high energy neutrinos that we can also use to study physics at higher energies than even the LHC can reach - albeit with far, far fewer collisions - and this gives us a chance to search for new physics as well.
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The high energy of the neutrinos we observed from TXS0106+056 and NGC1068 is "jaw-dropping" because of the huge energies involved - the highest energy neutrinos we have seen are hundreds to thousands of times the energies of protons in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. At these insane energies, the "ghostly bits" are actually a lot less "ghostly" to the extent where we look for high energy neutrinos (100's of TeV to PeV - protons in the LHC are 7 TeV) near the horizon because at these energies the Earth will start to block neutrinos.
It's interesting/crazy that the cross section increases with energy.
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KM3NET in Europe and P-ONE in Canada are both examples of water-based neutrino telescopes that are part of t
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Is this taken from the actual paper or is it some reporter or commenter's misinterpretation of the original text?
G-g-g-ghosts??? (Score:2)
Click-baity bullshit (Score:3)
The title should disqualify it from consideration (and from posting here).
Identifying clickbait, example criteria:
- an article about a field implies it's practitioners are collectively "baffled", "stumped", or "terrified"
- a whole field or major single concept is "changed forever", or "completely disproven"
I'm not saying the topic isn't interesting, or that the article doesn't have value. I didn't read it. I'm saying you shouldn't reward such laziness.
Anything discovered, no matter how small, that becomes added to the field's base of knowledge "changes it forever."
Powerful?! Neutrinos? (Score:3)
Erm, no.
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Unless we find a way to unlock their power.
New kind of X-ray machine? (Score:1)
If they could be tamed at a local level, they could perhaps make for safer x-ray-like machines.
Re: New kind of X-ray machine? (Score:3)
They interact too weakly with matter to be used that way. Youâ(TM)d need to be made of lead, and *extremely* fat (tens of meters thick) to see even a few interactions.
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You could use high energy neutrinos. The ones in the article have about ten orders of magnitude greater cross section than the solar or reactor ones usually being discussed when "10 light years of solid lead" comes up.
Of course, you can only ever get one scan because it would be like standing in the beam from a solar system sized LHC.
Tinfoil hat time (Score:2)
"... every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body ..."
not over my dead body; heck, they're not even American neutrinos.
major step forward (Score:3, Informative)
I for one really look forward to this advancement in technology where we've progressed to the point where neutrino detectors can actually take "pictures" of cosmological objects.
Until the advent of LIGO and its gravitational wave detection, we only had light (or, in a broader sense, electromagnetism) to observe the heavens.
That we have now advanced neutrino detectors so many can be spotted and their energies can be precisely measured, genuinely adds this as a third pillar to the tools of physics and astronomy.
Until some years ago it was unconcievable that we would be able to predict supernova, for example. While SN are amongst the most spectacular optical events, the EM is only a 1% afterthought of the 99% of energy that is released as the neutrino burst. I look forward to furthering our understanding of SN by early warning systems neutrino detectors will probably provide in the near future.
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I for one really look forward to this advancement in technology where we've progressed to the point where neutrino detectors can actually take "pictures" of cosmological objects.
That's probably never going to happen for two reasons. First, very few neutrinos from the source interact in our detector. We basically see one neutrino at a time and a handful a year so you can't really build up a picture from that. Secondly, we do not see the neutrino itself but the charged particle it produces when it interacts. This does not point in exactly the same direction as the neutrino itself. While, at these energies, the change in angle is incredibly small, it only needs the tiniest of changes
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That's probably never going to happen for two reasons. First, very few neutrinos from the source interact in our detector. We basically see one neutrino at a time and a handful a year so you can't really build up a picture from that.
Actually, it's statistically likely to happen in your lifetime. The next time a core-collapse SN happens somewhere in our galaxy (rate on average of about 1.5 per century), it will be close enough that neutrino detectors on earth will get thousands of interactions each, allowing us to watch what happens in the collapsing core of that star, and what happens in the proto-neutron star as it forms. Including the sudden cut-off of neutrinos if it then collapses to a black hole.
Also, the very high energy neutri
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Actually, it's statistically likely to happen in your lifetime. The next time a core-collapse SN happens somewhere in our galaxy
That already did happen - SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud was close enough to observe a burst of neutrinos from. However, Supernovae, and especially ones in our own galaxy, are not "cosmological objects" because they are thousands of light years away not millions to billions. Also, the neutrinos from supernovae are very low energy - about 10+ million times lower than the ones we see from NGC 1068 and TXS0106+056. This means that there is a far larger angle between the original neutrino and the charge
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Oops. Missed the cosmological object qualifier.
1987A was close, but still extragalactic (barely - certainly not as much so as the cool new results from NGC 1068). Taught us gobs about SNe! Wasn't thinking about spatial resolution in SN nus though: even with straight lines, a neutron star would have to be moon-level close to do that. Was thinking tomography style using time-resolution. For example, even with IceCube's singles-rate recording SN-nu detection style, a near enough SN (IIRC, at the kpc sca
NGC 1068 = Messier 77 (Score:2)
A few important background things that neither the summary or the linked to article mention: NGC 1068 is better known as Messier 77 (amateur astronomers can relate ...)
Also, M77 has an active galactic nucleus (AGN, see here [nasa.gov] and here [swin.edu.au]). So in effect it is a nearby Quasar, emitting in all parts of the spectrum from radio to X-rays.
And it is also classed as a Seyfert galaxy (bright in infra-red).
For more, read this article [sci.news].