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'Fantastic' particle could be most energetic neutrino ever detected
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02074-5NEWS
21 June 2024
‘Fantastic’ particle could be most energetic neutrino ever detected
The ultra-high-energy neutrino was spotted by deep-sea detectors and could point to a massive cosmic event.
By Davide Castelvecchi
An observatory still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has spotted what could be the most energetic neutrino ever detected. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos — tiny subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light — have been known to exist for only a decade or so, and are thought to be messengers from some of the Universe’s most cataclysmic events, such as growth spurts of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.
Neutrino physicist João Coelho stunned researchers at the Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Italy, on 18 June, when he revealed the discovery only at the very end of his talk.
The neutrino detection was “a fantastic event”, says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He added that the observation highlights the potential of the Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss (ARCA) observatory — a forest of detectors on ‘strings’ attached to the 3,500-metre-deep sea floor southeast of the Italian island of Sicily.
The neutrino “really stands out, very far away from anything else”, said Coelho, who is at the AstroParticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris. He did not disclose the precise direction from which the particle had come, nor when the observation occurred: doing so could have tipped off competitors about the possible origin of the neutrino, researchers at the conference told Nature. Coelho instead promised that these details would be revealed in a paper further down the line. “It would be really interesting to see where in the sky the neutrino originated,” says Nepomuk Otte, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
[...]
21 June 2024
‘Fantastic’ particle could be most energetic neutrino ever detected
The ultra-high-energy neutrino was spotted by deep-sea detectors and could point to a massive cosmic event.
By Davide Castelvecchi
An observatory still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has spotted what could be the most energetic neutrino ever detected. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos — tiny subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light — have been known to exist for only a decade or so, and are thought to be messengers from some of the Universe’s most cataclysmic events, such as growth spurts of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.
Neutrino physicist João Coelho stunned researchers at the Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Italy, on 18 June, when he revealed the discovery only at the very end of his talk.
The neutrino detection was “a fantastic event”, says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He added that the observation highlights the potential of the Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss (ARCA) observatory — a forest of detectors on ‘strings’ attached to the 3,500-metre-deep sea floor southeast of the Italian island of Sicily.
The neutrino “really stands out, very far away from anything else”, said Coelho, who is at the AstroParticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris. He did not disclose the precise direction from which the particle had come, nor when the observation occurred: doing so could have tipped off competitors about the possible origin of the neutrino, researchers at the conference told Nature. Coelho instead promised that these details would be revealed in a paper further down the line. “It would be really interesting to see where in the sky the neutrino originated,” says Nepomuk Otte, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
[...]