- 4104 - ICE CUBE NEUTRINOS - seeing without photons? The “IceCube Neutrino Observatory” has used 60,000 neutrinos to create the first map of the Milky Way made with matter and not light. Seeing with neutrinos!
-------------- 4104 - ICE CUBE NEUTRINOS - seeing without photons?
- IceCube Neutrino
Observatory sits beneath a green aurora in the icy Antarctic. Scientists have
traced the galactic origins of thousands of "ghost particles" known
as “neutrinos” to create the first-ever portrait of the Milky Way made from
matter and not light. This is a
brand-new way to study the universe.
-
- This gigantic detector
is buried deep inside the South Pole's ice.
Neutrinos earn their spooky nickname because their nonexistent
electrical charge and almost-zero mass mean they barely interact with other
types of matter. Neutrinos fly straight
through regular matter at close to the speed of light.
-
- By slowing these
neutrinos in ice, physicists have finally traced the particles' origins
billions of light-years away to ancient, cataclysmic stellar explosions and
cosmic-ray collisions.
-
- The capabilities
provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data
analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy. As these capabilities continue to be
refined, we can look forward to watching this picture emerge with
ever-increasing resolution, potentially revealing hidden features of our galaxy
never before seen by humanity.
-
- Every second, about 100
billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body. The tiny
particles are everywhere, produced in the nuclear fire of stars, in enormous
supernova explosions, by cosmic rays and radioactive decay, and in particle
accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth.
-
- Neutrinos, which were
first discovered zipping out of a nuclear reactor in 1956, are second only to
photons as the most abundant subatomic particles in the universe. The chargeless and near-massless particles'
minimal interactions with other matter make neutrinos incredibly difficult to
detect.
-
- Many famous
neutrino-detection experiments have spotted the steady bombardment of neutrinos
sent to us from the sun, but this cascade also masks neutrinos from more
unusual sources, such as gigantic star explosions called supernovas and
particle showers produced by cosmic rays.
-
- To capture the
neutrinos, particle physicists turned to IceCube, located at the Amundsen-Scott
South Pole Station in Antarctica. The gigantic detector consists of more than
5,000 optical sensors beaded across 86 strings that dangle into holes drilled
up to 1.56 miles into the Antarctic ice.
-
- While many neutrinos
pass completely unimpeded through the Earth, they do occasionally interact with
water molecules, creating particle byproducts called muons that can be
witnessed as flashes of light inside the detector's sensors. From the patterns
these flashes make, scientists can reconstruct the energy, and sometimes the sources,
of the neutrinos.
-
- Finding a neutrino's
starting point depends on how clear its direction is recorded in the detector;
some have very obvious initial directions, whereas others produce cascading
"fuzz balls of light" that obscure their origins.
-
- By feeding more than
60,000 detected neutrino cascades collected over 10 years into a
machine-learning algorithm, the physicists built up a stunning picture: an
ethereal, blue-tinged image showing the neutrinos' sources all across our
galaxy.
-
- The map showed that the
neutrinos were being overwhelmingly produced in regions with previously
detected high gamma-ray counts, confirming past suspicions that many ghost
particles are byproducts of cosmic rays smashing into interstellar gas.
-
- These astronomers were
the first ones to see our galaxy in anything other than light.
Just like previous revolutionary advances such as radio astronomy,
infrared astronomy and gravitational wave detection, neutrino mapping has given
us a completely new way to peer out into the universe. Now, it's time to see
what we find in a whole new way of seeing.
-
-
July 25, 2023 ICE
CUBE NEUTRINOS - seeing without photons? 4104
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