Scientists have made the first image of the Milky Way using neutrinos.
Now, by combining artificial intelligence and data collected over the course of a decade with the IceCube detector in Antarctica, researchers have found the first evidence of high-energy neutrinos that originated from inside the Milky Way and mapped the particles onto an image of the galaxy’s plane. It’s the first time our galaxy has been imaged with anything other than light.
The map includes suggestions of specific high-energy neutrino sources within the Milky Way that might be the remnants of past supernova star explosions, the cores of collapsed supergiant stars or other as-yet-unidentified objects, the team reports in the June 30 Science. But more research is needed to clearly pick those sorts of features out of the data.
Previously, only a few high-energy neutrinos have been traced back to their potential birthplaces, all outside the Milky Way. Those include two that appeared to come from black holes shredding their companion stars and others from a highly active galaxy known as a blazar (SN: 5/16/22, SN: 7/12/18).
2023-06-29 13:02:34
Source from www.sciencenews.org