Deep in the waters of the Mediterranean, physicists uncovered evidence of a scary subatomical particle ejecting space at a speed they could ever dream of.
“We found that we think that the most general neutrino has ever seen on Earth,” said Paul de Jong, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam and the current spokesman of global cooperation about 350 scientists who participated in the discovery.
The team announced on Wednesday its “UltraShita energy” neutrino va paper Published in Nature magazine. The finding closer to physics and astronomers a step closer to understanding what exactly puts the particles out there to such incomprehensible speeds.
On Tuesday at a press conference, scientists described the discovery as a look into what the universe looks like in its most extreme. “We have just opened a brand new window,” said Paschal Coyle, a physicist of the asthraděparty at the Marseille Particular Physics in France. “It’s really a very exciting first sight into this energy regime.”
Neutrinos are notorious antisocial. Unlike most other particles, they are almost weightless and have no electric charge, so they do not regularly match, repel or otherwise interact with matter. They flow almost everything – inner stars, whirling galaxies dust, ordinary people – without a trace.
Thus, neutrino, neutrinos, neutrinos point directly back to their origin, making them excellent guides to the natural, unknown “cosmic accelerators” that have created them. They are also spectacularly elusive and for decades scientists have been working on capturing instruments Deep in the mountains, under the frozen lakes and buried in Antarctic ice.
However, no captured neutrino had seen anything like that. Scientists have found that the ultra -energy energy of neutrino using a neutrino telescope Kilomer’s cube or KM3NET, which is still under construction but is already working. The instrument consists of a pair of detectors a few kilometers below the Mediterranean surface, off the coast of France and Sicily.
One detector-composed of light ball chains located along the entire length of the football field apart and anchored to the sea pumpkin built only 10 percent when one third of their sensors illuminated the character of neutrino observation.
The detector did not see the neutrino directly. Rather, it raised traces of other subatomical particles known as the Muon, created when neutrino crashed into a rock or sea water nearby.
That the Muon zip over KM3NET at lightning speed and leaving a trace of bright blue photons in an otherwise dark abyss. Using the Light and time of its arrival in various parts of the grid, the team derived the direction of the original neutrino. They also estimated that the neutrino carried 220 million electrons.
This is no greater than the energy of the falling ping-pong ball. However, the energy of the ping-pong balls is over a thousand billion billion particles. Here, pushed into one of the smallest spots in our universe, this energy was tens of thousands more than what can be achieved by the premiere accelerator in the world, Great Hadron Collider In CERN.
Delcope recorded UltraStiFit energy neutrino in February 2023. However, scientists needed two years to interpret and analyze data during which they turned between enthusiasm and skepticism.
To be honest, “it took a moment,” said Aart Heijboer, an astronomer Neutrino at the National Institute for Subatomical Physics in the Netherlands. Another scientist said the energy of the particle was so extreme that his overall data crashed his computer.
Before the discovery, the highest energy neutrino ever was detected by approximately 10 million billion electronvolts. This impressive record was set in 2014 by the ICECube Neutrino observatory, an even larger grid of light sensors built into Antarctic ice.
For a tool like the KM3NET, it is rare to detect such extraordinary neutrino so soon in his lifetime, which added skepticism of the result. Erik Blaufuss, Physicist Icecube at the University of Maryland, who wrote a corresponding comment in nature He said on Wednesday that he first heard hints of discovery at conferences last summer. “I think there was a lot of distrust that it could be real,” Dr. Blaufuss. “We haven’t seen anything like that over the decade of observation.”
KM3NET gained happiness, according to Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, astrophysics on Drexel University, which is not formally in the telescope team, but has the status of the observer. “It is amazing evidence that their detector works well,” she said, adding that one neutrino detection raises much more questions than answers. “
One big question is what kind of space accelerator could create such energy particles. Maybe a supermassive black hole that surrounds the gas and dust that surrounds it. Or perhaps a cataclysmatic explosion of gamma rays, the highest energy form of light that occurs when the heart of the stars run on each other.
Such processes emit charged particles that can break into near mass, and generate a rush of neutrinos that race across the universe and sometimes into binoculars on Earth. Another theory is that the charged particles interact with the light remaining from the Big Bang and create “cosmogenic” neutrinos that can bear the secrets of the development of the universe.
The KM3NET team will work to nail the direction of Neutrina more precisely to determine the origin of the particle. And as the telescope approaches in 2028, scientists hope that more neutrinos of comparable PEP could be revealed.
For Dr. De jong, the discovery underlined the importance of trying new types of detection such as acoustic and radio A reduction that can be better able to capture neutrine in ultra -fast energies.
“Now we know that this neutrinum is not just predicted,” he said. “They’re there.” Are real. ”
