Scientific news are a welcome distraction from the daily
onslaught on intelligence by republican flat earth no-nothings.
Congratulations to scientists for their hard work.
Wish you more success with gratitude.
34
"like toothpaste out of the top and bottom of a doughnut"
I don't know where Mr. Overbye gets his pastries, but apparently a non-Euclidean dentist has been tampering with them. Conventional doughnuts emit very little toothpaste, even when squeezed. If doughnuts have surpassed all other foodstuffs in their power to explain the precepts of topology, it is precisely because they, in the popular imagination, have no top. They have no bottom. Most significantly, they lack a center from which anything, let alone toothpaste, might emerge. You call this science?!?
Neither do I. This is popular science journalism, and, to mix my own metaphor, Mr. Overbye writes the cover off the ball, straight through the uprights. Carry on.
31
this comment made my day
12
Big news!! Excellent work by Dr. Tianlu Yuan and team!
5
Stranger than science fiction! Science rocks our world. Always great coverage NY Times!!!
11
I thought the leading suspects for the origins of most comic rays had long been supernovae, not quasars. Or am I just showing my age?
And also, are the sources of the occasional pitched baseballs (equivalent energy) from space, the UHE cosmic rays, thought to be the same? Might this solve them as well?
3
You're not wrong. "Cosmic Rays" is a unfortunate term (although it sounds cool). It's a grab bag of all the stuff that rains down on the Earth's atmosphere from the universe. The article doesn't make it exactly clear ( due to length restrictions): most cosmic rays are relatively well understood and even mundane. Our sun, for example, is a source. But cosmic ray detectors over the last 50 years, including Ice Cube, have recorded a handful of ultra high energy arrivals for which no one had any physics. What possible structure or event could accelerate these particles to such enormous energies? Unknown. Until now. But of course, now that we know where, there's a lot more HOW questions...
14
It's 250 million, not thousand. But...
Spread that out over 30 years
The USA spends more on weapons than the next 20 countries combined, most of which are allies. This is a very small investment.
And, I like to point out that 200 years ago, you could have said the same things about electricity. "What good is it? Why muck about with it?"
12
It is truly fascinating. But I wish the article mentioned how this information will be beneficial to humans, other than to partially uncover a mystery. $250,000 is a lot of money.
Sometimes, you have to invest in the unknown to make wonderful things happen in the future. Take a risk--it might improve your life.
9
Sorry, $250,000 is not a lot of money. Not even if it were just for salaries or equipment.
19
It is actually $250,000,000.
7
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the [left] shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
- Roy Batty "Blade Runner"
Obviously the neutrino is from the attack ship...
Nonetheless, a pretty amazing detection.
42
Any chance observations like these could test predictions of string theories?
E.g., might neutrinos from a fuzzball have some characteristic observable properties?
6
The neutrino came from "a type of quasar known as a blazar, in which our line of sight from Earth is along the jet — right down the gun barrel". How can we be sure that it came from the same place as the light from the quasar? If the neutrino has a non-zero rest mass and a speed less than the speed of light, won't its trajectory through the universe be different from that of a light ray?
5
Astronomers can’t determine the exact location of detected neutrinos, but can determine an approximate location . They then use other tools (optical, radio telescopes, for instance) to precisely place the source. In this case, the source was so energetic that there probably weren’t a lot of other possible sources in the area
7
Having been lightly involved with this project over the last 2 decades, I was astonished and thrilled to learn they were able to measure the direction of origin of this neutrino down to SIX ONE- HUNDREDTHS of a degree. You can do good astronomy with that kind of resolution. And it will only get better. These folks turned a crazy idea into a working "telescope", and a new window onto the universe has been opened.
21
I've heard Dr. Halzen, the Ice Cube director, say (I paraphrase here) : To get funding, we have to explain exactly what we expect to find. But the more exciting science will come from discoveries no one expected."
So, it works both ways. Nature has a great imagination.
12
Outstanding description of something that seems so distant (literally and metaphorically), yet is real and an interesting add to our cosmic inventory.
9
Mr. Overbye, I have thought of this many times, but once again you have confirmed it- you are a fantastic writer.
25
Now that they know where to look for at least one source of high-energy neutrinos, there is perhaps a chance, at last, to determine the neutrino's mass. Four billion light years of travel for simultaneously ejected gamma rays and neutrinos should produce a measurable delay between arrivals of the massless photons and neutrinos of tiny but finite mass. The neutrinos' energy (assuming that Ice Cube's data allow enable it to be estimated), together with their speed, will enable calculation of mass estimates. Very exciting! Of course, they may have to wait years for the next burst intense enough to produce detectable optical and neutrino signatures.
31
It's a dichotomy (I seem to be using this word a lot lately) to have such precise and advanced science being explained to us (leaving us all gawking with our mouth open), yet some (the right and corporations) question the most easily understandable science here on earth - That we are warming the planet to a point which will be our demise.
At any rate, (what is also not said in this article or any science article) is that once we have spent oodles of time, money and effort (I am in favor of it), we are going to be left with yet another question, and so on and so on.
Where did it all begin ? The chase is fascinating...
38
@Marc
Good points as well. Personally I think we eventually burst through a wall and come out the other side of of mirror existence of some sort. I believe the answers ultimately will be far beyond on our limited understandings.
Then again, we could all be swimming around some high being's fish bowl purely there for their entertainment.
At that unresolvable fuzziness level I suspect it's all quantum flux. A state, a timeless point, where all is nothing and everything at once in a grand supraposition representing all that can be prior to the emergence of that which will be. Ain't science WILD?!?
1
Wow! Five "verys", before the "rarely". Do they concatenate as exponents, multiplications, or additions?
Seriously, I love your writing Mr. Overbye, and your video narrations are spot-on.
You're one of the big reasons I'm a paid subscriber. Keep up the good work.
36
"Squirting fire down a gravitational gun barrel. Squeezed like toothpaste from a donut of doomed material. Flowing like ghosts. Very, very, very, very, very rarely."
I absolutely love the creative literary style of the author; some passages sound like out of a novel. Please do write more of it.
23
50 or 100 years from now, the physicists of that era are going to look back at us and...laugh.
5
But we don't today laugh at physicists from 50 and 100 years ago. Bohr, Einstein, Maxwell, Faraday, Newton, Kepler, Galileo. They are still relevant and their discoveries still very interesting.
9
You're right. It's just that it seems most physics springs off the whiteboard and then we rush around madly trying to find what the equations insist are real, instead of observing the universe and crafting equations to describe what we see. Cart-before-the-horse sort of stuff. Not what Bohr, Einstein, Maxwell, Faraday, Newton, Kepler, and Galileo did.
I've heard Dr. Halzen, the Ice Cube director, say (I paraphrase here) : To get funding, we have to explain exactly what we expect to find. But the more exciting science will come from discoveries no one expected."
So, it works both ways. Nature has a great imagination.
"Neutrinos go as straight through the universe as Einsteinian gravity will allow" ... and... then they ...eventually stop? Or do they just keep a goin' forever? Do they fizzle out or transform into something else?
11
IceCube is a brilliant project--however, it doesn't actually detect neutrinos directly. Instead, what happens is that a neutrino (very, very, very, very, very) rarely interacts with an atomic nucleus (in this case ice) and in the process creates a particle called muon. Muon is a charged particle so it can produce something called Čerenkov radiation (aka light). This light is what IceCube detects and it's how it knows there was a neutrino in the first place. This is one of the possibilities, but as mentioned in the article--neutrinos partake in something called "weak interactions," and those can "transform" neutrinos into something else.
25
Not sure this is correct. Sounds like the ice is being used as a giant scintillator. Muons don't make light, the scintillators do after being struck by them. The photomultipliers then multiply the signal.
The understanding is that they can practically travel forever. Newton's first law. Since the particle (very, very, very, very) rarely interacts, there is nothing to stop the particle from moving forever.
But like the 'Ice cube' experiment which is specially designed to slow it down to enable some interaction, the particle can, in fact, lose energy, in which case it will transform to some other particle
8
Shazam! SMBHs, blazars and neutrino alarms. Could this be particle physics heaven?
8
Wow! High energy neutrino multi-messenger astronomy. What will they think of next? I would like to see astronomers first detect gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes and then follow up with optical and radio telescopes. Astronomers might be able to detect light from the black hole's photon sphere as the boundary of the even horizon is distorted. I would like to know if a merging black hole creates a similar blazar.
3
So far, when chasing for to see where the LIGO gravity wave detections were coming from, they were not able to find anything from Black Hole-Black Hole mergers, however there was a spectacular visual obtained from the first colliding binary Neutron Stars, and apparently the radiation from the fission/fusion/fission products produced with the decompression and degradation of the Neutrons expelled from the merger itself, thrown into space and morphing from super-dense quasi-material to normal, heavy and usually unstable, thus radioactive Normal Matter, although on the high end of the density curve.
So, they Have been able to see these, and see the amounts and types of materials produced, and that has increased understandings greatly. Still waiting for a BH-Neutron Star merger though.
But so far, no, the SMBH's etc do not appear to produce the visual components, at least not that we have found so far.
3
Space is a continuously never ending mystery and this article makes it more interesting. In the article Astronomers Follow Ghost Particles Down the Barrel of a Black Hole by Dennis Overbye its makes me more interested in space. Ever since I was a little kid space was a big dream of mine to view. So when I saw this article it immediately caught my eye and I was intrigued. The endless possibilities of what can be out in Space is just incredible. It would be amazing to find out what there could be out there and this article may just help out. With all the mysteries in space I don't understand how anyone would not be interested in it.
29
There should be far more science reporting like this. How else can instill interest of the public into science? Especially when the movies most people watch have little to do with science and more with voodoo or pseudoscience.
56
I read Mr. Overbye's book "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos" when it came out in 1992. It painted such a vivid portrait of astronomer Alan Sandage, Hubble's protegé, who was attempting to determine the size and age of the universe no less. I've been a fan of his writing ever since. Dennis Overbye is the best at explaining strange science to non-scientists.
4
" Especially when the movies most people watch have little to do with science and more with voodoo or pseudoscience."
...and cartoons of comics superheroes. Well, even mosquitoes have some uses. The general public's seems not all that dissimilar.
2
In an anti-science age, this is very cool stuff.
83
How can we read this and not be blown away by what's possible next? "Why is it so far away?", is one of the most interesting of the many questions from this discovery. Are there any of these massive object much closer? How likely are we to capture a few more like it? Unlike it? Hawking surely would want to know. The event that launched this neutrino happened 4 billion years ago, about when the earth was barely beginning to cool from the accretion of mass that formed it.
Of course, here we are, part of the ecosystems of our planet, alive within the narrow eyeblink of time that represents life on earth so far, gawking at a strange object blasted our way before life here even began. More please.
89
Well said.
2
It was identified from this source, because Earth is in the direct line of fire of the jet of that black hole. Distance simply affects the probability of lying on the direct line of fire emanating from the jet.
7
And that probability is very, very, very, very, very small. Like something else, neutrinos happen.
1