The IceCube observatory has detected neutrinos from an active galaxy for the first time, revealing clues about how supermassive black holes gobble matter
In the zoo of subatomic particles, neutrinos are strange beasts. Unlike more familiar particles such as electrons and protons, ghostly neutrinos barely interact with normal matter at all: they can fly right through a planet as if it weren’t even there. This makes them irritatingly difficult to detect and, for neutrinos streaming in from cosmic objects in the sky, even harder to know exactly where they come from.
Located almost exactly at the Earth’s South Pole, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is just such a place, and it’s not your standard astronomical facility. For one thing, it doesn’t use a mirror to collect and focus light from cosmic objects as telescopes do; instead it has a series of relatively simple optical sensors hung along dozens of vertical strings, creating a 3-D array of over 5,000 sensors that can detect the location and times of flashes of light.
This technique allows scientists to detect neutrino events from space, though there’s a problem with unwanted events that mimic the true signals. Subatomic particles from other sources in the universe called cosmic rays can hit our atmosphere and create similar flashes of light, confusing the measurements. Scientists can differentiate between the two kinds of signals in a clever way, though: use the Earth itself as an immense filter.
This lovely spiral galaxy is relatively close by, a mere 47 million light-years from us, and bright enough to be spotted with binoculars. Earlier work analyzing IceCube neutrinos pointed to NGC 1068 as a possible source, but the data weren’t strong enough at the time to claim a discovery. These new results change that.
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