Space Neutrinos, a new eye in the sky

Fancy seeing the sky in neutrino? Supermassive black holes and enormous stellar explosions may give up their secrets now that neutrinos from space can be detected.

The South Pole IceCube neutrino observatory has seen a handful of ghostly high-energy neutrinos that almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy.

"We are witnessing the birth of this field," says Dan Hooper, a theoretical astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, who is not a member of IceCube.

Neutrinos are also expected to be produced in regions such as the centre of the Milky Way, where dark matter particles are thought to accumulate in large numbers and smash into each other. Now that IceCube has shown it can detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, the next step is to work out their direction. Neutrinos with a specific energy coming from the galactic centre would be an indirect detection of dark matter.

While the latest IceCube neutrino detections are too few to provide information about their direction, Halzen says that his team is sitting on a goldmine of unanalysed data collected after May 2012. "We will have lots of events to work with, and we will figure this out, if not this year then next year," he says. "You cannot imagine the excitement in the collaboration."

Until now, the only space neutrinos definitively detected came from the sun and a 1987 supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Last month, the IceCube collaboration published news of the detection of two high-energy neutrinos, each with an energy of about one petaelectronvolt. These neutrinos, discovered by accident a year ago and nicknamed Bert and Ernie, prompted the collaboration to go back and look at their data in more detail.

Source