Supermassive Black Hole A Star

Author notes

Ep. 34, Page 18

smbhax

on July 12, 2018

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica uses scores of optical sensors buried 2 km under the ice to look for flashes of light caused by highly charged particles moving through the ice at faster than the normal speed of light in that medium, a phenomenon known as Cherenkov radiation.

These flashes that far below the surface almost certainly result only from impacts of high-energy neutrinos, which are capable of passing right through the Earth without hitting anything at all—but once in a while, one does, and a new BBC article describes how, last year, IceCube detected the trail of a very high energy neutrino that scientists have now tracked all the way back to a 100 million solar mass supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 4 billion light years away, "just off the shoulder of the constellation Orion."

It's the first direct evidence showing high energy neutrinos can come from supermassive black holes!