What’s happening?
Recently, astronomers think they have caught something really special: seven mysterious particles called tau neutrinos. What’s happening?
Neutrinos come from way outside our galaxy. There are three types: electron, muon, and tau. Tau neutrinos are the trickiest to detect, therefore also called “ghost particle.” Neutrinos are very light and hardly ever touch anything, and they can travel super long distances through space without getting stopped. This makes them like secret messengers from far-off places in the universe.
Not only this, but about 100 trillion of them pass through our bodies every second, and we don’t even notice.
Imagine scientists discovering seven of these elusive neutrinos that might be coming from the farthest corners of the universe. These particular tau neutrinos come from powerful events far away in space. They’re like messages from distant cosmic happenings to us here on Earth.
The IceCube neutrino observatory is a special machine at the South Pole that finds neutrinos. A group of universities from all over the world built it and maintains it.
IceCube has lots of sensors buried more than a mile under the ice, along with detectors above the ice. IceCube is the biggest neutrino telescope in the world. When a neutrino hits the ice around the sensors, it might make some charged particles and radiation. The sensors detect this radiation, alerting scientists to the presence of a neutrino, and they utilize the characteristics of this radiation to gain deeper insights into the neutrino. Neutrinos come in different types, and IceCube can spot some of them right away. But for others, IceCube gathers data for many years, and then scientists go through the data to find events where neutrinos interacted.
Recently, scientists said they found instances in IceCube’s data from 2011 to 2020 that looked like tau neutrinos, with very high confidence—more than 99.999999%.
This discovery is a big deal because it confirms what scientists suspected about these elusive particles. It could also help us learn more about how the universe works and how these ghostly particles are created. So, it’s like uncovering a whole new chapter in the story of space!