Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Detected May Have Come From a Blazar

The strongest neutrino ever detected has continued its long journey to Earth on February 13, 2023. It came through outer space to our planet after it was spotted by the KM3NeT/ARCA neutrino detector, which sits under the Mediterranean Sea. It was about 220 PeV in energy, and the energy of other detected neutrinos is not that high; it is approximately 30 times higher. This particle, sometimes termed a “ghost particle”, has baffled scientists for decades and may have originated anywhere and in any manner.

Inside the Paper

The article published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP). by the KM3NeT team, applied the publicly available Astro-Multimessenger Modelling tool for the simulation of blazars based on real data. The study by researcher Meriem Bendahman changed the proton-to-electron energy ratio and the rate of particle acceleration to verify whether blazars can be responsible for the neutrinos. In addition, the simulations showed that blazars can be the source, and at the same time, they produced gamma rays not exceeding background estimates obtained from the Fermi Large Area Telescope.

Ghost Particles and Cosmic Accelerators

Their ghostliness comes from being extremely elusive, with zero electric charge, very low mass, and able to move through matter largely unaffected, with around 100 trillion neutrinos moving through our bodies per second. The energy contained in this neutrino was 220 PeV, which is about 30,000 times greater than what the Large Hadron Collider can produce. Blazars represent some of the most hostile environments in the universe. These are essentially active galactic nuclei whose black holes suck up all matter around them and emit high-energy plasma directly at Earth.

 

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