There should be plenty of these subatomic particles emerging from our galaxy, but they'd never been detected. Until now.
Yuya Makino, IceCube/NSFNeutrinos fill the universe, but you wouldn’t know that with your eyes. These subatomic particles are small—so small that physicists once thought they had no mass at all—and they have no electric charge. Even though trillions of neutrinos enter your body every second, the vast majority of them pass through without a trace., cryptic high-energy particles constantly streaming throughout the universe from all directions.
Neutrinos can help researchers find out, but they have to see those particles first. Until now, astronomers had only confirmed that they’d found neutrinos originating from outside our galaxy. But in a papertoday, a global team of astronomers announced a long-sought goal: the first neutrinos that hail from the plane of the Milky Way itself., an astronomer at the University of Salerno in Italy, who was not an author of the paper.
Seeing these ghosts is a tricky task. A neutrino observatory looks nothing like a telescope or a radio dish. Instead, the paper’s authors worked with an array of holes drilled more than a mile into the South Pole ice: the . Down those shafts, deep in the frozen darkness, IceCube’s detectors watch for light trails from the particles that neutrinos spawn when they collide with matter.In water or ice, light only travels around three-quarters of its speed limit. Particles can move through those substances quicker than that . If they do, they shoot out cones of bright light called Cherenkov radiation, equivalent to a
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