The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is located beneath a green aurora in icy Antarctica. Image: IceCube/NSF
SPACE — Scientists have traced the galactic origins of thousands of “ghost particles” known as neutrinos. This was to create the first portrait of the Milky Way made not of light, but of matter to provide a new way of studying the universe.
The breakthrough image was taken by photographing the neutrinos as they fell through the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a giant detector buried deep in the ice of the South Pole. Neutrinos have earned the spooky nickname, ghosts, because of their non-existent electric charge and nearly zero mass. That is, they hardly interact with other types of matter. Thus, neutrinos fly straight through ordinary matter at speeds close to the speed of light.
But by slowing down these neutrinos, physicists eventually traced the origins of the particle billions of light years away to the cataclysmic explosions of ancient stars and collisions of cosmic rays. The researchers published their findings June 29 in the journal Science.
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“The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us a whole new view of our galaxy, previously only hinted at,” said Denise Caldwell, director of the National Science Foundation’s physics division, which funded the research.
According to him, as the detector’s capabilities continue to be refined, we can see images emerge with ever-increasing resolution. “It has the potential to reveal hidden features of our galaxy that have never been seen by mankind.” Source: LiveScience
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2023-06-30 16:43:23
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