“Ultra-high energy” neutrino found under the sea by telescope

Deep inside the Mediterranean waters, physicists reveal evidence that ghostly subatomic particles have catapulted through space at the speeds they once dreamed of.

“The University of Amsterdam physicist and current spokesman for the global cooperation of around 350 scientists involved in the discovery,” said Paul de John, “The University of Amsterdam physicist and current spokesman for the global collaboration of around 350 scientists involved in the discovery.”

The team published “Ultrahigh Energy” neutrinos on Wednesday in a paper published in the journal Nature. This discovery brings physicists and astronomers one step closer to understanding precisely what thrusts particles at such immeasurable speeds.

At a press conference Tuesday, researchers described the discovery as a peek at what the universe appears to be the most extreme. “We've just opened a whole new window,” said Pascal Coyle, a space particle physicist at the Centre for Particle Physics in Marseille, France. “This really gives us the first glimpse into this energy regime.”

Neutrinos are well known for being antisocial. Unlike most other particles, they do not carry charges in near-gravity and therefore do not regularly collide, repel or interact with material. They flow through almost everything, including the gauze of stars, the dust of the galaxy stirring, the ordinary people.

Thus, unhindered neutrinos turn their origins straight and make them an excellent guide to the natural and unknown “space accelerators” that created them. They are also grand and elusive, and for decades, scientists have tried to lock them in with musical instruments buried in Antarctic ice deep in the mountains, under frozen lakes.

However, previously captured neutrinos do not resemble anything like this. Scientists have discovered ultra-high energy neutrinos using the Kilometer Cube Neutrino Telescope, or KM3NET. The instrument consists of a couple of miles of detectors beneath the Mediterranean surface off the coast of France and Sicily.

One Detector – One Detector consists of strings of a Light Catch Orb, fixed to the seabed away from the length of the soccer field – one-third of the sensor is a distinctive flash of neutrino observations It was only 10% built when lit up. .

The detector did not directly see the neutrino. Rather, they picked up traces of different subatomic particles known as moons, created when neutrinos hit nearby rocks and seawater.

The moon plunged through the km3net at a fast lightning speed, leaving a trace of bright blue photons in the otherwise darker depths of the ocean. Using the light patterns, the team inferred the direction of the original neutrino using the time of arrival at different parts of the grid. They also estimated that neutrinos carried 220 million electronic bolts of energy.

It is not greater than the energy of a falling ping pong ball. However, the energy of ping pong balls is spreading to tens of billions of particles. Here we have narrowed it down to one of the smallest spots of matter in our universe. That energy has been more than tens of thousands of times more than what CERN's big hadron colider, the world's finest particle accelerator, could achieve.

The telescope recorded ultra-high energy neutrinos in February 2023. However, researchers needed two years to interpret and analyze the data, during which they swayed between uplifting and skepticism.

“To be honest, it took a while for it to sink,” Heijboer Aart, a neutrino astronomer at the Netherlands National Institute of Subatomic Physics, said at a press conference Tuesday. Another scientist said that the energy of the particles was so extreme that its total data crashed his computer.

Before discovery, the highest energy neutrino ever detected was approximately 10 million electronicol. The impressive record of that time was set in 2014 by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an even larger grid of light sensors embedded in Antarctica ice.

It is rare for an instrument like the KM3NET to detect such extraordinary neutrinos early in its lifetime, adding to the skepticism of the outcome. Erik Blaufuss, an IceCube physicist at the University of Maryland, wrote a response comment in nature on Wednesday, but said he first heard hints from a conference discovery last summer. “I think there was a lot of distrust that this could be real,” Dr. Blaufus said. “In our decade of observation, we haven't seen anything like this.”

Km3net has been blessed with good fortune. According to Kurahashi Neilson, an astrophysicist at Drexel University, he has observer status, not a telescope team. “It's amazing how well the detector works,” she said, adding that detection of just one neutrino “suggests more questions than the answer.”

One of the big questions is what kind of space accelerators produced such energy particles. Perhaps an ultra-high Massive black hole, greedily devouring the gas and dust surrounding it. Or maybe it's a random burst of gamma rays, the highest energy light that occurs when the star's mind falls into itself.

Such a process releases charged particles that can impact nearby matter, passing through the cosmos and sometimes produces gusts of neutrino winds that compete against telescopes on Earth. Another theory is that these charged particles interact with the light left behind from the Big Bang, creating “cosmic formation” neutrinos that can carry secrets about the evolution of the universe.

The KM3NET team works to more accurately identify the neutrino orientation to better identify the origin of the particles. And as the telescope approaches completion in 2028, scientists hope that more neutrinos from comparable PEPs may reveal themselves.

For Dr. De Jong, the discovery underscored the importance of attempting new types of detection, such as acoustic and wireless sensing, which may allow for better capture of neutrinos at ultra-high energy.

“Now we know that these neutrinos aren't just predicted,” he said. “They're there. They're real.”