A telescope located in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, at 3,500 meters below the surface, has identified the most energetic neutrino ever recorded.
This particle has an energy 10,000 times higher than the maximum reached by the world’s largest particle accelerator, the LHC. And approximately 30 times more than any other neutrino observed previously.
This discovery has been a great surprise for the scientific community, including those responsible for the finding.
“It is the elementary particle with the highest energy ever observed,” says excited Juande Zornoza, a 48-year-old physicist from Alicante who leads the Spanish participation in the KM3NeT underwater observatory, where the discovery was made.
In physical terms, this neutrino has reached 220 petaelectronvolts, something “extraordinary.” “The increase in energy is so significant that it seems like this neutrino has been produced by a new source or mechanism,” highlights the researcher from the Institute of Corpuscular Physics, a joint center of the CSIC and the University of Valencia.
The discovery is published this Wednesday in the journal Nature, a benchmark in world science.
Details of the discovery made by the telescope in the Mediterranean
On February 13, 2023, the ARCA detector, one of the two observatories of KM3NeT located near the coast of Sicily, Italy, captured a particle of extremely high energy. Its detectors function as huge strings of pearls hanging on the seabed.
Each sphere acts as an eye designed to detect a blue flash that occurs in the water when a particle exceeds the speed of light in this medium, known as Cherenkov radiation. The detected particle was a muon resulting from the decay of a neutrino near the observatory.
This discovery represents a great success for this telescope located in the Mediterranean. It aims to be the most powerful in the world when completed in about five years.
The facility, with a total cost of approximately 350 million euros, will be the successor to the current neutrino observatory: IceCube, built by the United States, with detectors embedded in the ice of Antarctica.
Origin of the neutrino found in the Mediterranean
The origin of this neutrino remains a mystery. Those in charge of the experiment believe it comes from somewhere outside our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Neutrino detectors are installed underground, underwater, or in ice to shield themselves from the noise caused by millions of other particles constantly colliding with the atmosphere and reaching Earth.
In 1934, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi named this particle “neutrino” to differentiate it from the “neutron” and to indicate that it has no charge and hardly any mass. These characteristics allow neutrinos to travel through the universe for billions of years without deviating or being affected.
Therefore, neutrinos are exceptional cosmic messengers that bring information about the most violent phenomena in the universe, such as cosmic rays. They can help understand why the current universe is filled with matter and not antimatter, thanks to an imbalance that occurred in the moments following the big bang that originated the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.
Juande Zornoza explains that a possible origin of this neutrino could be a blazar. This is a type of galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center, where matter falls into the hole and produces jets of accelerated particles; a “supercatastrophic” source.
Another possibility is that it is the remnants of a cosmic ray that has interacted with the remnants of light left from the Big Bang that originated the universe.
A third, much more remote option, is that this neutrino comes from the decay of dark matter. The unknown component that constitutes 25% of the entire universe. Starting today, theoretical physicists from around the world will begin to calculate to try to explain the origin and nature of this particle.
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