A team of scientists has discovered that neutrino is full of energy – a special substance that cannot be lost – after a star destroys how it is eaten by black hole.
A team of scientists has discovered that a neutrino is full of energy – a substance that is particularly accessible – after the destruction of a star because it is consumed by a black hole. This discovery, reported in the journal Astronomy of nature, sheds new light on the origins of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays – the highest energy particles in the Universe.
The work, which included researchers from more than two dozen institutions, was among them New York University and Germany DESY research center, with a focus on neutrinos – subatomic particles made on Earth only in powerful accelerators.
A view of the generating disk around the supermassive black hole, with jet-like structures flowing away from the disc. The true mass of the black hole bends space-time, allowing the opposite side of the generation disk to be seen as an image above and below the black hole. Credit: DESY, Communication Science
Neutrinos – as well as the creation process – are hard to find, making the discovery, along with the discovery of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs), in particular.
“The origins of cosmic high-energy neutrinos are unknown, especially because they are extremely difficult to crush,” explained Sjoert van Velzen, one of the paper’s lead authors and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics. NYU at the time of the discovery. “This result is just the second time full-energy neutrinos have been found back to their source.”
The following video, created by NASA, research partner on the Astronomy of nature work, detailing the findings in more detail (video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center).
Previous research by van Velzen, now at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and NYU physicist Glennys Farrar, co-author of the new one Astronomy of nature paper, find some of the earliest evidence of black holes destroying stars today called Tidal Disorder events (TDEs). These findings set the stage for determining whether TDEs may be responsible for the production of UHECRs.
The research reported in Astronomy of nature he offered support for this decision.
Previously, the Neutrino IceCube Observatory, a detector with support from the National Science Foundation based in the South Pole, reported the discovery of a neutrino, whose path was later traced by the Zwicky Transitional Facility at the Palomar Observatory Caltech.
In particular, his measurements showed a spatial convexity of neutrinos full of energy and light emitted after TDE – a star emitted by a black hole.
“This shows that these star-shaking events are powerful enough to accelerate energetic particles,” van Velzen explains.
“The discovery of TDEs-related neutrinos is disappointing in understanding the origin of the high-energy astrophysical neutrinos identified by the Ice Pole detector at the South Pole that the their sources to date are accessible, ”said Farrar, who suggested in a 2009 paper that UHECRs could accelerate in TDEs. “The neutrino-TDE combination also sheds light on a decades-old problem: the origin of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays.”
After the supermassive black hole separated the star from each other, about half of the star debris was ejected back into space, and the rest formed a shiny disk around the black hole. The system shone brightly over many waves and is thought to have produced vibrant, jet-like currents, perpendicular to the collection disk. A moderately strong engine near the collection disc spewed out these fast subatomic grains. Credit: DESY, Communication Science
Read Ghost Particle From Star Shredded by Black Hole featuring Cosmic Particle Accelerator for more about this research.
Details: “Coincidental tidal incident with high energy neutrino” by Robert Stein, Sjoert van Velzen, Marek Kowalski, Anna Franckowiak, Suvi Gezari, James CA Miller-Jones, Sara Frederick, Itai Sfaradi, Michael F. Bietenholz, Assaf Horesh, Rob Fender, Simone Garrappa, Tomás Ahumada, Igor Andreoni, Justin Belicki, Eric C. Bellm, Markus Böttcher, Valery Brinnel, Rick Burruss, S. Bradley Cenko, Michael W. Coughlin, Virginia Cunningham, Andrew Drake, Glennys R .Farrar, Michael Feeney, Ryan J. Foley, Avishay Gal-Yam, V. Zach Golkhou, Ariel Goobar, Matthew J. Graham, Erica Hammerstein, George Helou, Tiara Hung, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Charles D. Kilpatrick, Albert KH Kong, Thomas Kupfer, Russ R. Laher, Ashish A. Mahabal, Frank J. Masci, Jannis Necker, Jakob Nordin, Daniel A. Perley, Mickael Rigault, Simeon Reusch, Hector Rodriguez, César Rojas-Bravo, Ben Rusholme, David L Shupe, Leo P. Singer, Jesper Sollerman, Maayane T. Soumagnac, Daniel Stern, Kirsty Taggart, Jakob van Santen, Charl otte Ward, Patrick Woudt and Yuhan Yao, February 22, 2021, Astronomy of nature.
DOI: 10.1038 / s41550-020-01295-8
The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (CAREER grant 1454816, AAG grant 1616566, PIRE grant 1545949, NSF grant AST-1518052)