Neutrinos are the fastest, lightest, and therefore most elusive particles in nature. If we add that they are very energetic, their diverse and exciting profile is complicated.
The IceCube experiment detected on December 4, 2012 from Antarctica one of these elusive particles with an energy of 2 petaelectronvolts -2,000 billion electron volts- , the most energetic neutrino known, without a doubt.
Now, an international team of astrophysicists has revealed that that cosmic neutrino named after a character from Sesame Street, “Caponata” (“Big Bird” in English), came from an energy source in the galaxy PKS B1424-418 with a 95% probability, a blazar, a colossal radiofrequency and gamma ray explosion associated with a black hole located in this distant galaxy . We are thus facing a new era of astronomy: neutrino astronomy.
” Our work shows the first plausible association between cosmic neutrinos and an object outside our galaxy , which gives a definite impulse to the birth of a new scientific discipline: neutrino astronomy”, Eduardo Ros, professor of the University of Valencia, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn (Germany) and co-author of the work.
After ruling out all possible alternative energy sources, scientists, with the help of a network of radio telescopes in Australia, South Africa, Chile and Antarctica called TANAMI, NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope and the IceCube observatory itself, discovered that everything fit.
“It was fortunate that we were studying galaxies with the TANAMI project and that we have found the ‘culprit’ for emitting the record neutrino. Neutrino astronomy has just been born. Soon we will be able to locate the origin of a neutrino with an accuracy of 0.6 degrees. If we continue studying the cosmos with the available telescopes, we will be closer to unraveling the secrets of the origin and physics of these phenomena , which until recently escaped our understanding ”, explains Matthias Kadler, leader of the study published in the journal Nature Physics.
