Scientists have been tracking a high-energy particle velocity through the Earth in what they worship as a major breakthrough.
The particle fell in the direction of the earth in December 2016 and came from outer space almost at the speed of light. As it flew into Earth, it exploded in an electron buried in an ice plank on the South Pole, producing a particle that then decayed into a multitude of secondary particles.
The particles were picked up by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a large telescope buried beneath the surface of Antarctica.
The event captured by the equipment is known as a Glashow resonance event. Such events have been predicted but never seen directly – and ultimately their observation could help confirm the deepest foundations of particle physics, scientists say.
This is the first time that an individual neutrino has been proven to be of astrophysic origin, scientists say. In this and other ways, it is also shown how the IceCube equipment – which consists of a series of sensors immersed under the ice – can help to explore the universe.
The event gets its name from Sheldon Glashow, a physicist from the Nobel Prize winner who predicted it would happen in 1960. In an article published during his research in Denmark, he suggested that an antineutrino, if the conditions were exactly right, could connect with an electron to create more unseen particles through a process called resonance.
The unseen particle was discovered in 1983 and was called the W boson. It was also found to be much heavier than expected, which means that its production would require artificially impossible amounts of energy: it requires a neutrino with more than 1000 times more energy than in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider can be produced.
But researchers have suggested that it would be possible to use space as a large, natural accelerator. Outside in space, there are extreme cosmic events – black holes in the center of galaxies and similar objects – that can themselves generate the necessary energy.
The energetic antineutrino that shot through the earth in 2016 was probably sent to earth by such an object, researchers said.
‘When Glashow was a postdoctoral fellow with Niels Bohr, he could never have imagined that his unconventional proposal to the W– boson would be realized by an antineutrino from a distant galaxy crashing into the Antarctic ice, ”said Francis Halzen, professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the headquarters of IceCube maintenance and operations, and chief investigator of IceCube said.
The research is described in an article entitled ‘Detection of a particle shower at the Glashow resonance with IceCube’, published in Nature today.