Scientists detect record-breaking ‘ghost particle’ in the Mediterranean Sea – CNN
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Astronomers using a giant network of sensors, still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, have found the highest-energy cosmic “ghost particle” ever detected.
The neutrino, as the particle is formally known, is 30 times more energetic than any of the few hundreds of previously detected neutrinos.
These tiny, high-energy particles from space are often referred to as “ghostly” because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can pass through any kind of matter without changing. Neutrinos, which arrive at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, have almost no mass. The particles travel through the most extreme environments, including stars, planets and entire galaxies, and yet their structure remains intact.
An analysis of the neutrino authored by the KM3NeT Collaboration, which includes more than 360 scientists from around the world, was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“Neutrinos … are special cosmic messengers, bringing us unique information on the mechanisms involved in the most energetic phenomena and allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of the Universe,” said study coauthor Rosa Coniglione, KM3NeT deputy spokesperson and researcher at Italy’s INFN National Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement.
The record-breaking neutrino, named KM3-230213A, had the energy of 220 million billion electron volts. This astonishing amount makes it around 30,000 times more powerful than what the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland — known for supercharging particles to nearly the speed of light — is capable of, according to the study authors.
“One way I like to think about it is that the energy of this single neutrino is equivalent to the energy released by splitting not one uranium atom, or ten such atoms, or even a million of them,” said study coauthor Dr. Brad K. Gibson in an email. “This one little neutrino had as much energy as the energy released by splitting one billion uranium atoms … a mind-boggling number when we compare the energies of our nuclear fission reactors with this one single ethereal neutrino.”
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The particle provides some of the first evidence that such highly energetic neutrinos can be created in the universe. The team believes the neutrino came from beyond the Milky Way galaxy, but they have yet to identify its exact origin point, which raises the question of what created the neutrino and sent it flying across the cosmos in the first place — perhaps an extreme environment such as a supermassive black hole, gamma ray burst or supernova remnant.
The groundbreaking detection is opening up a new chapter of neutrino astronomy, as well as a new observational window into the universe, said study coauthor Paschal Coyle, KM3NeT spokesperson and researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille in France.
“KM3NeT has begun to probe a range of energy and sensitivity where detected neutrinos may originate from extreme astrophysical phenomena,” Coyle said.
Neutrinos are difficult to detect because they don’t often interact with their surroundings — but they do interact with ice and water. When neutrinos interact directly with the detectors, they radiate a bluish light that can be picked up by a nearby network of digital optical sensors embedded in ice or floating in water.
For example, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole includes a grid of more than 5,000 sensors embedded in the Antarctic ice. The detector has been operating since 2011, and has discovered hundreds of neutrinos. Scientists have been able to trace some of them back to their cosmic sources, such as a blazar or the bright core of an active galaxy.
An international team conceived the idea of a network of detectors in the early 2010s — known as the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope, or KM3NeT — that might be able to pick up neutrinos in the deep ocean. Installation of the network began in 2015.
The KM3NeT made the record-breaking detection on February 13, 2023, when the particle lit up one of its two detectors. ARCA, or the Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss, rests at a depth of 11,319 feet (3,450 meters), while ORCA, or Oscillation Research with Cosmics in the Abyss, is at a depth of 8,038 feet (2,450 meters) at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
The ARCA detector, off the Sicilian coast near Capo Passero, Italy, was designed
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