Breakthrough in the search for cosmic particle accelerators

Using an internationally organised astronomical dragnet, scientist have for the first time located a source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, ghostly elementary particles that travel billions of light years through the universe, flying unaffected through stars, planets and entire galaxies. The joint observation campaign was triggered by a single neutrino that had been recorded by the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole, on 22 September 2017. Telescopes on earth and in space were able to determine that the exotic particle had originated in a galaxy over three billion light years away, in the constellation of Orion, where a gigantic black hole serves as a natural particle accelerator. Scientists from the 18 different observatories involved are presenting their findings in the journal Science. Furthermore, a second analysis, also published in Science, shows that other neutrinos previously recorded by IceCube came from the same source.

Artist's impression of the active galactic nucleus. The supermassive black hole at the center of the accretion disk
sends a narrow high-energy jet of matter into space, perpendicular to the disc
[Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab]

The observation campaign, in which research scientists from Germany played a key role, is a decisive step towards solving a riddle that has been puzzling scientists for over 100 years, namely that of the precise origins of so-called cosmic rays, high-energy subatomic particles that are constantly bombarding Earth's atmosphere. "This is a milestone for the budding field of neutrino astronomy. We are opening a new window into the high-energy universe," says Marek Kowalski, the head of Neutrino Astronomy at DESY, a research centre of the Helmholtz Association, and a researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin. "The concerted observational campaign using instruments located all over the globe is also a significant achievement for the field of multi-messenger astronomy, that is the investigation of cosmic objects using different messengers, such as electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves and neutrinos."

Messengers from the high-energy universe

One way in which scientists expect energetic neutrinos to be created is as a sort of by-product of cosmic rays, that are expected to be produced in cosmic particle accelerators, such as the vortex of matter created by supermassive black holes or exploding stars. However, unlike the electrically charged particles of cosmic rays, neutrinos are electrically neutral and therefore not deflected by cosmic magnetic fields as they travel through space, meaning that the direction from which they arrive points straight back at their actual source. Also, neutrinos are scarcely absorbed. "Observing cosmic neutrinos gives us a glimpse of processes that are opaque to electromagnetic radiation," says Klaus Helbing from the Bergische University of Wuppertal, spokesperson for the German IceCube network.""Cosmic neutrinos are messengers from the high-energy universe."

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory encompasses a cubic kilometer of pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface
and next to the NSF Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. In this illustration, based on an aerial view near the
South Pole, an artistic rendering of the IceCube detector shows the interaction of a neutrino with a molecule
of ice. The display pattern is how scientists represent data on recorded light. Every coloured circle represents
light collected by one of the IceCube sensors. The color gradient, from red to green/blue,
shows the time sequence [Credit: IceCube Collaboration/NSF]

Demonstrating the presence of neutrinos is extremely complicated, however, because most of the ghostly particles travel right through the entire Earth without leaving a trace. Only on very rare occasions does a neutrino interact with its surroundings. It therefore takes huge detectors in order to capture at least a few of these rare reactions. For the IceCube detector, an international consortium of scientists headed by the University of Wisconsin in Madison (USA) drilled 86 holes into the Antarctic ice, each 2500 metres deep. Into these holes they lowered 5160 light sensors, spread out over a total volume of one cubic kilometre. The sensors register the tiny flashes of light that are produced during the rare neutrino interactions in the transparent ice.

Five years ago, IceCube furnished the first evidence of high-energy neutrinos from the depths of outer space. However, these neutrinos appeared to be arriving from random directions across the sky. "Up to this day, we didn't know where they originated," says Elisa Resconi from the Technical University of Munich, whose group contributed crucially to the findings. "Through the neutrino recorded on 22 September, we have now managed to identify a first source."

From radio waves to gamma radiation

The energy of the neutrino in question was around 300 tera-electronvolts, more than 40 times that of the protons produced in the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the European accelerator facility CERN outside Geneva. Within minutes of recording the neutrino, the IceCube detector automatically alerted numerous other astronomical observatories. A large number of these then scrutinised the region in which the high-energy neutrino had originated, scanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum: from high-energy gamma- and X-rays, through visible light, to radio waves. Sure enough, they were able for the first time to assign a celestial object to the direction from which a high-energy cosmic neutrino had arrived.