Neutrinos in the last breath of a star

High-energy neutrino identified in the last breath of a star devoured by a black hole.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, is due to research coordinated by the University of New York and the German Desy research center, and may help to better understand the physics of these mysterious particles.

In fact, the authors of the study think that black holes are accelerators of natural particles powerful enough to project high-energy neutrinos into space.

Thanks to computer models and various telescopes, space and terrestrial, the researchers reconstructed the journey of this neutrino.

Reconstruction of the death of a star swallowed by a black hole (source: DESY, Science Communication Lab)

It started about 700 million years ago, when the first animals evolved on Earth.

To project it into the cosmos after devouring a star, due to its enormous gravitational pull, a giant black hole with a mass equal to 30 million times that of the Sun, in the constellation Delfino.

The neutrino's journey then concluded in October 2019 to the South Pole, where it was captured by the neutrino hunter IceCube, immersed in the Antarctic ice.

"The origin of the high-energy cosmic neutrinos is still largely unknown, because they are notoriously difficult to capture," explains one of the research coordinators, Sjoert van Velzen, a former New York University physicist, now in force at the Dutch University of Leiden.

For the expert, “it is the second time that one of the sources of these cosmic neutrinos has been reconstructed”.