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Neutrino Factory in Space: Elementary Particles From the Depths of Our Universe

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Embark on a Journey through the Universe: The Discovery of the Extragalactic Neutrino Factory. Credit: © Benjamin Amend For the first time, researchers have uncovered the origin of neutrinos, elementary particles that reach our planet from the depths of the universe. Highly energetic and difficult to detect, neutrinos travel billions of light years before reaching Earth. Although it is known that these elementary particles originate from the depths of our Universe, their exact origin remains a mystery. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Würzburg and the University of Geneva (UNIGE), sheds light on one aspect of the puzzle: neutrinos are thought to have been born in a blazar, the core of a galaxy filled with supermassive black holes. These results were published on July 14 in the journal Astrophysics Journal Letter . The atmosphere of our planet is constantly being bombarded by cosmic rays. It consists of electrically charged particles with very high ene

Astrophysicists Think They've Found a Mysterious Source of High-Energy Neutrinos

Some of the brightest and most energetic objects in the Universe are the mystery source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, new research has confirmed. A comprehensive analysis has been convincing enough to link the galaxies that host the fiery cores known as blazars with these mysterious particles. It’s a result that provides a completely unexpected solution to a problem that has kept astrophysicists scratching their heads for years. “The results provide, for the first time, irrefutable observational evidence that the PeVatron blazar sub-sample is a source of extragalactic neutrinos and thus an accelerator of cosmic rays,” said astrophysicist Sara Buson of the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Germany. Neutrinos are the odd little things at the best of times. These subatomic particles are ubiquitous and are among the most abundant in the Universe. However, their mass is almost zero, they are electrically neutral, and they interact very little with anything else in the universe

A mission concept to fly a solar neutrino detector close to the sun

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This is one of the new images of the Sun from ESA’s Solar Orbiter’s closest approach on March 26, 2022. Credit: ESA Astronomers have proposed a concept mission to fly a neutrino observatory into orbit around the sun to get a better picture of what’s going on in the sun’s core. Astronomers have very few tools to peer into the heart of the sun. Fortunately, the constant nuclear reactions taking place in the sun’s core as hydrogen combine to form helium release a relentless flood of neutrinos. Neutrinos are tiny, ghost-like particles that almost never interact with matter. On Earth we’ve built giant detectors to catch the occasional neutrino. Astronomers have used these neutrinos to understand the nuclear processes taking place inside the sun and to probe the edges of known physics. But our observatories on Earth are basically limited because our planet is so far from the sun. So what if we took the neutrino observatory into space? A te