On Sept. 22, 2017, a ghostly particle ejected from a far distant supermassive black hole zipped down from the sky and through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
In 2018 a team of physicists linked to the massive IceCube Observatory detector buried under the South Pole, and to a command center at Penn State University, advanced satellites, and several land-based observatories, pinpointed the first known cosmic source of a neutrino, a ghost-like particle that passes through virtually all matter on Earth. It’s estimated that each second there are about 100 billion neutrinos passing through your body. (more…)