Neutrinos are ghost-like beings. These particles are not easily distracted when traveling through space. As long as scientists try to detect them, they can be traced to the source more easily than other particles. Recently, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory reported the discovery of the second known source of cosmic neutrinos, from the active region of the galaxy M77, 47 million light-years away.
Neutrinos are weird, they are everywhere, but have little mass and no charge, most of the time they don’t interact with other particles, even though trillions of neutrinos flow by every second and you don’t know it . Unlike other particles, however, while neutrinos are indifferent to their surroundings, they are also not easily “distracted” and tend to travel straight from the source.
At present, most of the neutrinos detected by scientists on Earth come from the sun, but some neutrinos come from outside the solar system, even far beyond the Milky Way. set up to capture these neutrinos.
In 2018, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory discovered cosmic neutrinos from the quasar TXS 0506+056 for the first time, when scientists believed that neutrinos may be produced by jets from black holes.
Now, scientists from Michigan State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Technical University of Munich, Germany and other units have used the IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect another neutrino stream again, identifying the source as the M77 galaxy ( NGC 1086).
The M77 galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy about 47 million light-years away from the earth. Unlike the Milky Way, the former is very active, and most of the radiation is not generated by stars, but by the supermassive black hole in the center.
After the researchers reprocessed the data, more than 80 neutrinos were detected from the direction of the NGC 1068 galaxy, but the black hole of the M77 galaxy did not have jets at the moment. , which is filled with matter pulled in by the black hole’s gravitational field, with extremely high-energy magnetic fields above and below to produce neutrinos.
While the new study still can’t pinpoint exactly how cosmic neutrinos are created, it could provide another path to understanding supermassive black holes obscured by dust.
(First image source: Icecube)
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