Icecube tagged posts

A record-shattering particle from deep space may have exposed some of the universe’s most extreme black hole engines. A mysterious particle from deep space has scientists buzzing after the most energetic neutrino ever detected slammed through the Mediterranean Sea. Now, researchers think they may have identified the cosmic “culprits” behind it: blazars — supermassive black holes blasting jets of matter straight toward Earth.

Three years ago, scientists detected something extraordinary deep beneath the M...

Gamma-ray flares from blazars can be accompanied by high-energy neutrino emission. To better understand this phenomenon, an international research team has statistically analyzed 145 bright blazars. They constructed weekly binned light curves and utilized a Bayesian algorithm, finding that their sample was dominated by blazars with low flare duty cycles and energy fractions. The study suggests that high-energy neutrinos of blazars might be produced mainly during the flare phase.

Blazars ...

Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a hazy band of stars stretching from horizon to horizon.

For the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghost-like astronomical messengers.

In research published June 29 in the journal Science, the IceCube Collaboration—an international group of more than 350 scientists—presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission coming from the Milky Way.

We have not...

Physicists at MIT have designed a pocket-sized cosmic ray muon detector to track these ghostly particles. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

Pocket-sized device detects charged particles in surrounding air. At any given moment, Earth’s atmosphere is showered with high-energy cosmic rays that have been blasted from supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena far beyond the Solar System. When cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they decay into muons – charged particles that are slightly heavier than an electron. Muons last only fractions of a second, and during their fleeting lifespan they can be found through every layer of Earth’s atmosphere, circulating in the air around us and raining onto the surface at a rate similar to a light drizzle...