"We had a hint back then (in 2017), and now we have evidence," Ajello said. "In this work," the study authors wrote, "we show that blazars are unambiguously associated with high-energy astrophysical neutrinos at an unprecedented level of confidence."Ī rendering of the IceCube detector shows the interaction of a neutrino with a molecule of ice. Though this debate ought to be put to rest, per the new study's team, as it cross-checked IceCube's findings with a catalog of blazars - PeVatron blazers, to be exact, which speed up particles to at least 10^15 electron-volts - and obtained strong proof that the two are entangled. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Other experts, for example, believe cosmic rays are blips of stardust crashing through space, the product of violent supernovas illuminating the universe. In 2017, this observatory detected a neutrino that was later traced to a frightening blazar called TXS 0506+056.īut there was still debate over whether these blazars really are natural particle accelerators that manufacture cosmic rays. So, focusing on multi-messenger astronomy, to get to the bottom of things, the scientists first analyzed what they call the "largest available neutrino data set" optimized for the search, collected from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a science base buried deep within the South Pole. "The same is true in astrophysics because the insight you have from multiple detections of different messengers is much more detailed than you can get from only light." Searching from within the South Pole You'll get a much better understanding," Marco Ajello, associate professor of Physics and Astronomy at Clemson University and author of the study, said in a statement. "It's like feeling, hearing and seeing at the same time. Rather than rely only on light to decode the universe - the driving force behind NASA's exceptional James Webb Space Telescope, for instance - scientists can call on elusive particles, and even gravitational waves, to dissect the ins and outs of space-borne phenomena. Fascinatingly, these sort of "particle messengers" are giving rise to a whole new field of astronomy called multi-messenger astronomy. Think of neutrinos as little shadowy messengers, telling us where their cosmic ray parents are. Thus, the research team realized that if we can understand where astrophysical neutrinos come from, we'll have a solid idea of where cosmic rays might originate as well. Their legacies are connected, so to speak. Specifically to cosmic rays, however, neutrinos are thought to begin somewhere along the puzzling particles' lifespan. As they travel, neutrinos don't touch even the tiniest building blocks of life - atoms - which means trillions of them are actually zipping through your atoms right now. They're so evasive they interact with hardly anything, yet forcefully blast throughout the cosmos. Known as "ghost particles," neutrinos are a massive enigma in themselves. "This of course means we are sitting right in the particle beam being spewed at us by the black hole," Francis Halzen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of physics and lead scientist for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, who wasn't involved in the new study, said in a statement.īasically, the new study's team used the art of deduction to figure out where these strange atom bits come from.įirst, they tracked down a sort of cosmic ray offshoot called a neutrino. It's the kind of phenomena one might expect fierce particles to come from. The short version is that they think cosmic rays come from blazars, or galaxies holding enormous black holes with energetic jets that point toward Earth - streams so intense they're mightier even than the entire surrounding galactic region. But on Thursday in the journal Science, astrophysicists announced they might have uncovered an important clue for putting together a cosmic ray origin story. In fact, this question has plagued scientists for over a century. What kind of extreme cosmic factory could make such a thing, you ask? Unclear. They threaten the health of astronauts living in orbit, even when sparse in number. They get caught in our atmosphere and mess up our satellites. Born in the cradle of deep space, blasting across the universe at nearly the speed of light and harnessing energy up to a million times greater than anything achieved by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, cosmic rays are atom fragments that relentlessly rain down on Earth.
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