Yahoo News Cosmic ‘ghost particle’ traced offering new ‘window on the universe’
Strange cosmic ‘ghost particles’ have been traced to their source by a research station buried in the ice near the South Pole in a major breakthrough.
The ghostly particles called high-energy neutrinos travel through space, zipping unimpeded through people, planets and whole galaxies – but scientists have never traced their source before.
Researchers detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica’s surface, then traced their source back to a giant elliptical galaxy with a massive, rapidly spinning black hole at its core, called a blazar.
It is located 3.7 billion light years from Earth in the Orion constellation.
The key observations were made at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at a U.S. scientific research station at the South Pole and then confirmed by land-based and orbiting telescopes.
Researchers believe we could use high-energy neutrinos to examine distant objects in space.
Darren Grant, spokesman for the IceCube scientific collaboration said, ‘Neutrinos provide us with a new window with which to view the universe.
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‘In many ways neutrinos are nature’s ideal astronomical messenger. They can essentially escape their site of production and bring that information directly across the cosmos to their point of detection.’
The findings solve a mystery dating to 1912 over the source of subatomic particles like neutrinos and cosmic rays.
It appears they come from some of the universe’s most violent locales.
