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'Ghost' particles traced back by astronomers to a distant galaxy

Science July 14, 2018
Scientists spotted a high-energy, tiny "ghost" particle called a neutrino flying through Antarctic ice and traced its origins. The particle travels at nearly the speed of light and cruised 3.7 billion years before being detected on Earth.
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For the 1st time, scientists using & ’s have found the source of a high-energy neutrino from outside our galaxy! This tiny particle that travels at nearly the speed of light, cruised 3.7 billion yrs before being detected at Earth

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A particle called a neutrino was detected on Earth, found by sensors deep in the Antarctic ice, and traced to its source for the first time. Neutrinos are known as "ghost particles" because they can pass through solid objects.

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On Sept. 22, 2017 "The neutrino was detected by a South Pole observatory called IceCube that was specifically designed to catch the particles." "It's an achievement that opens a whole new way of looking at the universe." Wow! I gotta say, that day was a good day.

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Described by Frederick Reines, one of the scientists who made the first neutrino detection, as “the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being,” one neutrino is estimated to contain one millionth of the mass of an electron.

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The high-energy detected by on 9/22/17 suggested that this neutrino had to be from beyond our solar system. It struck the Antarctic ice w/ energy of ~300 trillion electron volts – more than 45x the energy achievable in the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth.

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Neutrinos are the honey badgers of particle physics. They give no fucks about any of us, charging through the universe doing their own thing. Everything else exciting about this discovery comes back down to that utter indifference as they ghost through our planet.

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We're talking ridic high energies, far surpassing anything we can artificially accelerate. Burgess: "You'd have to make an accelerator the size of the orbit of Mercury to get things as energetic as these things are that are hitting us. How does that ever happen?!"

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Several of the people I talked to equated the dawn of neutrino astronomy* to gaining a new sense. * aka: Now we can not only detect them, but also (sometimes) track them back to where they're from.

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This is also cool just because it's a . We first spotted cosmic neutrinos over a century ago. While we had a lot of theories, we'd never actually directly connected this neutrino comes from that source before. Finding ANY source is awesome.

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This discovery of the source of a high-energy neutrino is a lot like the first detection of gravitational waves. It will mean opening another observational window into the universe. Good stuff .

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Astronomers traced a neutrino back to a distant galaxy. “We have found the first source of cosmic rays.”

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