Our galaxy seen through a new lens: neutrinos detected by IceCube
icecube.wisc.edu
Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a horizon-to-horizon hazy band of stars. Now, for the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghostlike astronomical messengers. In an article to be published tomorrow, June 30, ...

Observations of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos have shown that they mostly originate from extragalactic sources such as active galaxies. However, gamma ray observations show bright emission from within the Milky Way galaxy, and astrophysical gamma rays and neutrinos are expected to be produced by the same physical processes. The IceCube Collaboration searched for neutrino emission from within the Milky Way (see the Perspective by Fusco) and found evidence of extra neutrinos emitted along the plane of the Galaxy, which is consistent with the distribution of gamma-ray emission. These results imply that high-energy neutrinos can be generated by nearby sources within the Milky Way.

-Editor’s summary from the Science article

  • @macarthur_parkOPEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    I have to admit I had guessed this announcement by the IceCube collaboration would be that they’d identified a localized source of high energy neutrinos (and maybe even had a multi messenger signal such as correlations with gravitational waves or electromagnetic observations).

    But this is cool too! They imaged the galactic plane in neutrinos using a dataset 60,000 neutrinos spanning 10 years of IceCube data.

    • drailin
      2•1 year ago

      I was hoping for the same thing, but alas. My research group members were watching the press release and thought it was a garbage livestream for such an awesome result.