A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos
In 2016, #IceCube (the neutrino detector, not the Mastodon client) began sending out alerts every time they detected a #cosmic #neutrino, prompting other astronomers to train telescopes in the direction it came from.
The following September, they tentatively matched up a cosmic neutrino with an #active #galaxy called TXS 0506+056, or #TXS for short, that was emitting flares of X-rays and gamma rays at the same time. “That certainly sparked a lot of interest,” said Marcos Santander, an IceCube collaborator at the University of Alabama.
More and more cosmic neutrinos were collected, and another patch of sky began to stand out against the background of atmospheric neutrinos. In the middle of this patch is the nearby active galaxy #NGC 1068.
IceCube’s recent analysis shows that this correlation almost certainly equals causation. As part of the analysis, IceCube scientists recalibrated their telescope and used artificial intelligence to better understand its sensitivity to different patches of sky. They found that there’s less than a 1-in-100,000 chance that the abundance of neutrinos coming from the direction of NGC 1068 is a random fluctuation.
“We were partially blind; it’s like we’ve turned the focus on,” said Halzen. “The race was between gamma-ray bursts and active galaxies. That race has been decided.” ( in favor of Active Galactic Nuclei being the source of cosmic neutrinos)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-map-of-the-universe-painted-with-cosmic-neutrinos-20230629/