Discovery Of Cosmic Neutrinos Signals New Era Of Astronomy

November 21, 2013

Computers at the IceCube laboratory collect raw data in near-real time from detectors buried deep in the Antarctic ice.
Credit: Felipe Pedreros, IceCube/NSF

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Astronomers working with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica have announced that they have, for the first time, observed 28 very high-energy particle events, leading them to conclude that “the era of neutrino astronomy has begun.”

Cosmic neutrinos are nearly massless particles that stream to Earth at the speed of light from outside our solar system. This observation, published in the journal Science, will allow scientists to learn about the nature of astrophysical phenomena that occurs millions to billions of light years away from Earth.

“The sources of neutrinos, and the question of what could accelerate these particles, has been a mystery for more than 100 years. Now we have an instrument that can detect astrophysical neutrinos. It’s working beautifully, and we expect it to run for another 20 years,” Gregory Sullivan, who led the team from University of Maryland, said in a statement.

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, which is more than the kinetic energy of a flying bug.

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

Continue Learning: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113010258/icecube-cosmic-neutrino-discovery-astronomy-112113/

Bigger, faster, stronger: stepping up the hunt for cosmic building blocks

Professor Rolf Heuer, director general of Cern, will attend the opening of Collider at
London's Science Museum this week. Photograph: Laurent Gillieron/AP

Building it cost £5bn; it took 20 years to construct, and is still to operate at full strength. Yet scientists have already turned their attention to designing a replacement for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator which last year revealed the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic entity which plays a key role in giving mass to the building blocks of the universe.

Proposals for a new machine include building a giant underground circular tunnel. This would be similar to the LHC – which is based at the Geneva HQ of Cern, the European particle physics laboratory – but would be more than 100km in diameter: four times the size of the current collider. An alternative device would hurtle particles in straight lines along a tunnel that would be more than 50km long.

In either case, the bursts of intense energy that would be released by colliding particles in these machines would help scientists probe matter to new levels. In particular, it would help them pinpoint material known as dark matter which is believed to account for most of the mass of the universe today.

Continue Learning: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/10/particle-physics-universe-building-blocks-large-hadron-collider