Today is a day of good news for astronomy. And the fact is that after reports of gravitational waves comes information about another great mystery of the universe: the elusive neutrino. They are known as ghost particles. They have no charge, their mass is small, and they hardly interact with matter. Because of this, they usually pass Earth undetected. However, thanks to IceCube Observatorynot only neutrinos were discovered, but also the first drawing belonging Milky Way matter, not electromagnetic radiation.
We are again faced with before and after in the history of astronomy. Something that hasn’t been done so far. Scientists from US National Science Foundationwho made the anticipated announcement today, which could be followed live.
This is just the beginning, they said, as they hope to uncover more and more hidden features and higher resolution data. This is just the beginning, yes, but what a start!
What are neutrinos and how to detect them?
neutrino very small subatomic particless, without a charge and almost do not interact with matter, since they are not affected by either the strong nuclear force or the electromagnetic force. They are weakly affected by weak nuclear and gravitational forces. But it is something so light that in general, despite the fact that there are a lot of them, they pass through the Earth unnoticed. This makes them known as ghost particles.
To try to find them and find out what they can teach us, an observatory was built in 2010. Ice Cube. It is an array of 5,000 digital optical modules suspended in 1 cubic kilometer of ice. buried at the south pole. They are not capable see neutrino. But they can display information about their movement if they are infrequently detected. collisions with ice atoms.
Logically, these collisions could also occur with other particles. However, it is known that during the collision of neutrinos protons in atoms become neutrons and other particles, called muons, acquire a positive charge.
Interesting drawing of the Milky Way
There were already some indications of the discovery of the neutrino, although it was later found that it was false alarms.
However, this time they do not just believe that they have detected ghost particles with a high probability. They also served paint Milky Way. And that’s what they noticed light patterns coming from IceCube point to certain parts of the sky, so you can tell where the neutrinos came from. Knowing this, they developed an algorithm that could connect these bright spots and, to their surprise, discover that they corresponded to places in the Milky Way. So, if you put them together, you can get a kind of drawing of our galaxy, which for the first time is made not of light, but of matter particles.
Right now it has a low resolution, but it will get better and better. The ghost particles finally showed their faces, and they did it in a big way.
Source: Hiper Textual
