Mutiul Alim | Friday, 30/06/2023 13:01 WIB
Ghost particle portrait in the Milky Way Galaxy (Photo: BBC)
London, Jurnas.com – An astronomical probe buried in Antarctica has discovered a ghostly particle in a new image of the Milky Way Galaxy, which has never been seen before.
The ghost particles are neutrinos, which are very difficult to detect from Earth. To find it, scientists turned a huge block of Antarctic ice into a detector.
“This is the first time we have seen our Galaxy using particles rather than photons (light). This provides insight into the high-energy processes that make up our Galaxy,” said Prof Subir Sarkar from the University of Oxford. BBC on Friday (30/6).
Neutrinos can be thought of as astronomical messengers indicating these fundamental processes. They are created when particles called cosmic rays travel at speeds close to the speed of light, crashing into other matter.
Catching those collisions basically means catching neutrinos. And it’s not easy. “Neutrinos are ghost particles, essentially almost massless,” explained Sarkar.
“They basically travel at the speed of light and probably pass through the galaxy and not interact with anything. That’s why, to see them, you need a big detector,” he continued.
The detector, designed by scientists and engineers called IceCube, consists of thousands of sensors on long wires drilled and frozen into a 1 cubic km block of ice. The entire array is buried near the South Pole.
TAGS : Antarctic Milky Way Galaxy Ghost Particles
2023-06-30 06:01:00
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