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Elementary particles originate from three billion light-years distant galaxy / black hole as particle accelerator
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Multimessenger astrophysics has been crowned with success: a research team has for the first time located a cosmic source of high-energy neutrinos. The trigger for the search was a single high-energy neutrino, which had been detected on 22 September 2017 in the ice of Antarctica by the neutrino telescope IceCube. Earth and space telescopes subsequently determined the origin of this elementary particle. It lies in a galaxy three billion light-years distant in the constellation Orion, in which a gigantic black hole naturally accelerates particles. Scientists from 16 astronomical observatories participated in the campaign worldwide. Among the researchers are also Prof. Dr. Sebastian Böser and Prof. Dr. Lutz Köpke from the Institute of Physics of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), which belongs since 1999 to the IceCube consortium. The results of this joint search were recently published in the journal Science.
(Image Martin Wolf, IceCube/NSF, 2017)
(Image Martin Wolf, IceCube/NSF, 2017)