Our galaxy’s ghost neutrinos have finally been found

A team has re-analyzed 10 years of data collected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and found evidence of neutrino emissions in the center of our galaxy that point to long-sought sources of cosmic rays.

You neutrinos They are subatomic particles so small that physicists thought they had no mass, in addition to having no electric charge.

Because they are the product of cosmic rays, mysterious high-energy particles that continually stream through the universe in all directions, the scientific community has been eager to find them.

So far, astronomers have only found neutrinos that originated outside our galaxy. However, a scholarly article published in Sciencesannounces that a team has found The first neutrinos of the Milky Way.

quoted popular scienceThis is it A very important discovery“.

To discover them, the team did not use a telescope, but drilled a series of holes more than a kilometer and a half into the Antarctic ice: IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Under wells, detectors from ice Cube Discover the light paths of particles produced by neutrinos when they collide with matter.

“What has changed in this analysis is that we have actually improved on the methods we used,” explained Mirko Honnefeld, a scientist at the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany and a member of the collaboration. ice Cube.

The team improved its AI tools and analyzed more than 59,000 detections collected between 2011 and 2021, and compared them with projected models of neutrino sources.

The new analysis of data from ice Cube successfully identified diffuse emission from Neutrinos glow in the center of the Milky Way Statistically significant is about 4.5 sigma.

Despite the shortcomings in using 5 sigma physicists to confidently classify the discovery as reliable, the findings represent a significant milestone in the use of neutrinos as a means of mapping the universe.

The next step will be to constrain the points in the sky where these neutrinos come from. More sensitive detectors may help with this task.