Steve Sclafani, a graduate student working with Dr. Kurahashi Neilson at Drexel who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, and Mirco Hünnefeld, a graduate student at the Technical University Dortmund in Germany, spearheaded the analysis, taking advantage of advances in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence.
“We’re really doing a needle-in-the-haystack search,” Mr. Hünnefeld said.
To avoid the possibility of deceiving themselves, the analysis of 10 years of IceCube data was performed blind. The researchers did not look at any of the intermediate results, and the scientists did not know until the end whether their analysis had turned up any Milky Way neutrinos at all. “It was fully possible that we opened up that box and we saw zero,” Dr. Sclafani said.
Instead, the analysis turned up hundreds of neutrinos that came from the galactic plane of the Milky Way. There appears to be some correlation between neutrinos and gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. Both are created in the cascade of particles that spill out when high-energy cosmic rays slam into other particles like hydrogen gas molecules in interstellar space.
There is a suggestive bright spot near the galactic center — perhaps neutrinos generated by the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole — but “it’s not as statistically significant,” Dr. Kurahashi Neilson said. As more data is collected, neutrino emissions from the center of the galaxy will become distinct — or it will fade because it was just a statistical fluke.
The showering of cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos on Earth shows the universe is anything but calm, with exploding stars, and black holes swallowing their surroundings.
“We’re seeing all of these incredibly violent and energetic processes,” said Regina M. Caputo, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who was not involved with the IceCube project.
Elizabeth A. Hays, the project scientist for NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, said IceCube will provide a new and different view. “Now that we also have the neutrinos,” she said, “we can look at those things together to really understand where is energetic matter coming from, in our galaxy and beyond it.”
24World Media does not take any responsibility of the information you see on this page. The content this page contains is from independent third-party content provider. If you have any concerns regarding the content, please free to write us here: contact@24worldmedia.com
Common Mistakes When Using Athletic Field Tarps
High-Performance Diesel Truck Upgrades You Should Consider
Warehouse Optimization Tips To Improve Performance
Fire Hazards in Daily Life: The Most Common Ignition Sources
Yellowstone’s Wolves: A Debate Over Their Role in the Park’s Ecosystem
Earth Day 2024: A Look at 3 Places Adapting Quickly to Fight Climate Change
Millions of Girls in Africa Will Miss HPV Shots After Merck Production Problem
This Lava Tube in Saudi Arabia Has Been a Human Refuge for 7,000 Years
Four Wild Ways to Save the Koala (That Just Might Work)
National Academy Asks Court to Strip Sackler Name From Endowment
Ways Industrial Copper Helps Energy Production
The Ins and Out of Industrial Conveyor Belts