How heavy is a neutrino? The answer may lead us to a new físicaDescubierta the first ray source cosmic Surprise! Not all of the neutrinos pass through the Earth
neutrino are a few subatomic particles extremely slippery without a load and just without mass. This allows them to travel in a line straight across the universe across anything they find, including galaxies, planets, and ourselves. However, they are “ghosts”, barely interact with matter. We can not see them nor feel them. The majority of the that reach our planet come from the Sun or the atmosphere, but a few, the high-energy, originate much further away.
on The 12th of July 2018, the experiment IceCube , a huge observatory buried under the ice of Antarctica has announced the detection of one of these powerful neutrinos inergalácticos. It was not the first time that “hunted” neutrinos of very high energy, but yes the first in which researchers were able to trace his path and discover his origin.
The particle is solitary, known as IceCube-170922A, came from a blazar , one of the most violent events in the Universe, called TXS 0506 + 056 and situated at 3,800 million light-years away in the constellation of Orion. A blazar is an elliptical galaxy giant with a huge supermassive black hole that rotates rapidly in its core. Emitted from its poles two giant jets of light and elementary particles that go in opposite directions. One of the jets of this blazar in particular points directly toward the Earth, which was key to uncovering the origin of neutrino. The finding also allowed us to identify the first source of the cosmic rays, a jets of particles of high energy that bombard continuously the Earth.
Collision cosmic
Other objects show properties quite similar to those of TXS 0506 + 056, so for the scientists it was a “mystery why only this has been identified as the issuer of neutrinos,” says Silke Britzen, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Germany and lead author of the article. What is it that makes it unique to this galaxy? Why is it so special?
The researchers studied observations of the galaxy taken between 2009 and 2018 to get to know your activity before and after the event of the neutrino. To their surprise, they found an unexpected interaction between the material of the jet in the blazar. Although it is assumed that the plasma jet flows without interruptions in a kind of channel, the situation seemed to be different. This has led the team to propose in the magazine “Astronomy & Astrophysics” that neutrinos could be generated by a collision cosmic between the injected material.
“This collision of injected material is currently the only viable mechanism that can explain the detection of neutrinos from this source,” says Markus Böttcher of the University of Northwest in Potchefstroom (south Africa), co-author of the article.
IceCube Collaboration, MOJAVE, S. Britzen and M. Zaja?ekDoble black hole
The researchers also think it possible that there are two supermassive black holes in the central region of this galaxy, something that happens sometimes when two galaxies have a black hole in its center you collide. This pair of black holes may eventually merge and produce the equivalent of super-massive mergers of stellar black holes detected in gravitational waves by the collaboration of LIGO / Virgo.
According to the researchers, appears to be the first time that reports of a possible collision of two jets at scales of a few light years, to the time that attribute the creation of a neutrino cosmic collision by the jet of a black hole.
