On Sept. 22, 2017, a ghostly particle ejected from a far distant supermassive black hole zipped down from the sky and through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth.
IceCube Neutrino Observatory
The cosmic invader –a messenger from the depths of extragalactic space, carrying secrets from some of the most extreme physics in the universe– triggered a cacophony of code-red detectors in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (image below) located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, perhaps solving one of the enduring mysteries of physics and the cosmos.
During the past two years, two strange events have occurred at our Milky Way’s violent center. In October of 2019, Milky Way’s central black hole, SgrA (literally “Sagittarius A-star”) which until May, 2019, when it suddenly brightened, appeared like a massive, dormant volcano, a sleeping monster, a slumbering region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that “what goes into them does not come out”. A “one-way door out of our universe,” said Event Horizon Telescope director and astronomer Shep Doeleman of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about discoveries of the enigmatic objects stranger than science fiction that led to three 2020 Noble Prize awards in physics.