New research has shown that some of the most energetic objects in the Universe are the source of high-energy Cosmic Neutrinos.
The analysis shows that the blazars are linked to the galaxies.
It's a result that gives a really unexpected solution to a problem that has puzzled astrophysicists for a long time.
The results provide for the first time, incontrovertible observational evidence that the sub-sample of PeVatron blazars is extragalactic.
At the best of times, Neutrinos are strange. The most abundant particles in the universe are the subatomic particles.
Their mass is zero, they're neutral, and they don't interact with anything else in the universe. The normal matter of most of the Universe is a shadow, and this is why it is called a ghost particle.
We have a good idea of where normal neutrinos come from.
They're made by radioactive decay. Most of the neutrinos we detect at Earth are by-products of nuclear reactions in the Sun, but they can also be produced by artificial nuclear reactions or interactions between atoms.
There were some really strange ones found in the observatory.
They can produce a small flash of light when interacting with water atoms.
These flashes can be detected by the detectors embedded in the ice at the south pole. The energy of the neutrino can be revealed.
There were two neutrinos that were unlike anything we had seen before. Their energy was 100 million times more powerful than a supernova. The high-energy neutrinos came from outer space.
There was a hint as to that source in the beginning of last year. A huge international collaboration of scientists was able to trace a high-energy neutrino back to a blazar because they don't interact.
jets of ionized matter accelerated to near light-speed point directly at Earth when the nucleus of a massive galaxy was powered by an active black hole.
Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at the time that blazars were unlikely to be sources of cosmic rays.
There were still questions about the association between blazars and high energy neutrinos. A group of scientists led by Buson went agging.
They took 7 years' worth of data from IceCube and compared it to a catalog of 3,561 objects that are either confirmed blazars or highly likely to be.
They tried to determine if high-energy neutrinos could be linked to the locations of blazars.
"With this data, we had to prove that the blazars that were in close proximity to the neutrinos weren't there by chance," said the astronomer.
The random association can only surpass the real data once in a million trials. This is proof that our associations are right.
The probability of a random occurrence is zero. It's possible that some blazars are capable of producing high-energy neutrinos, which will help solve another problem. The origin of high-energy Cosmic rays is a huge mystery.
Buson says that high-energy neutrinos are produced in processes that accelerate the rays. The team said that this means that we can link blazars with Cosmic Ray Acceleration.
The accretion process and rotation of the black hole lead to the formation of relativistic jets, where particles are accelerated and emit radiation up to energies of a thousand billion of that of visible light. Tramacere made a statement.
The "Rosetta stone" of high-energy astrophysics may be the reason for the connection between these objects and the Cosmic rays.
There are a number of avenues that need to be explored from here. To find out why some blazars are more efficient than others. The team will be able to figure out what the characteristics of a neutrino factory are and where in the universe they might be found.
More detailed analysis of the data may lead to more discoveries about the birthplaces of these strange particles.
The research has appeared in a journal.
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