ICECUBE OBSERVATORYIceCube records more energetic neutrinos: possibly from outside the galaxy ICECUBE OBSERVATORY
The IceCube particle detector team, a collaboration of 276 researchers from 12 countries, reported what may be the first observation of neutrinos from outside our galaxy in an article in the November 22, 2013 issue of Science. Neutrinos are elementary particles produced in large quantities in nuclear reactions inside stars and in extreme cosmic phenomena like stellar explosions called supernovae. They are very difficult to detect. As they have no electric charge and almost no mass, they pass through the human body without being noticed. Between 2010 and 2012, IceCube used a network of underground detectors scattered around the inside of a cubic kilometer block of ice in Antarctica, near the South Pole, to capture the signs of the passage of 26 neutrinos with an energy of 30 trillion electron volts—more than a million times more energetic than the most energetic neutrinos emitted by the Sun. Although some neutrinos may have been produced by cosmic rays colliding with the Earth’s atmosphere, physicists believe that most of them come from extragalactic space. A greater number of neutrinos will have to be detected in order to identify from where in the sky they are coming.
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