World’s largest particle detector opens up a new branch of astronomy

Within the eternal ice of Antarctica, scientists have observed the first solid evidence for high-energy neutrinos coming from cosmic accelerators beyond our own solar system. Between May 2010 and May 2012 the IceCube detector at the South Pole captured a total of 28 neutrinos with energies greater than 30 teraelectronvolts (TeV). Two of the neutrinos had an energy of more than 1,000 TeV — that’s more than the kinetic energy of a fly in flight — compressed into a single elementary particle. The international IceCube collaboration, in which DESY is the second-largest partner after the University of Wisconsin-Madison, now presents these observations in the current cover story of the scientific journal Science.

“This is the first indication of very high-energy neutrinos coming from outside our solar system,” says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 “Perhaps, we are currently experiencing the birth of neutrino astronomy,” says Ackermann. The analysis did not find any statistically significant clustering of the 28 events either in time or space - the number of events is too small. “We are now working hard on improving the significance of our observation, and on understanding what this signal means and where it comes from”, says collaboration spokesperson Professor Olga Botner of Uppsala University (Sweden). With an increase in the number of events the scientists hope to identify sources of high energy neutrinos in the cosmos.

The international IceCube team consists of 260 scientists from eleven countries.

Source: DESY Website