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IMAGE: Smoking gun: After the supermassive black hole tore the star apart, roughly half of the star debris was flung back out into space, while the remainder formed a glowing accretion. view more
Credit: Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab
Tracing back a ghostly particle to a shredded star, scientists have uncovered a gigantic cosmic particle accelerator. The subatomic particle, called a neutrino, was hurled towards Earth after the doomed star came too close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of its home galaxy and was ripped apart by the black hole s colossal gravity. It is the first particle that can be traced back to such a tidal disruption event (TDE) and provides evidence that these little understood cosmic catastrophes can be powerful natural particle accelerators, as the team led by DESY scientist Robert Stein reports in the journal
DESY, Science Communication Lab
In a distant galaxy, a supermassive black hole ripped a star to bits, sending out an enormous blast of energy. For the first time, researchers have observed a neutrino that probably came from this type of cataclysm, which is called a tidal disruption event or TDE.
Neutrinos are tiny particles that rarely interact with other matter, making them extremely difficult to detect. On 1 October 2019, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica spotted a neutrino with relatively high energy that appeared to come from beyond our galaxy.
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Meanwhile, Robert Stein at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) and his colleagues were using the Zwicky Transient Facility in California to watch a star that had got too close to a supermassive black hole. The extreme gravity of the black hole shredded the star, creating a TDE that lasted for months. The TDE and the IceCube neutrino came from the same location in the sky, indicating that the ripped-up sta
A team of scientists has detected the presence of a high-energy neutrino in the wake of a star s destruction as it is consumed by a black hole. This discovery sheds new light on the origins of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays the highest energy particles in the Universe.
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IMAGE: The Zwicky Transient Facility captured this snapshot of tidal disruption event AT2019dsg, circled, on Oct. 19, 2019. view more
Credit: ZTF/Caltech Optical Observatories
For only the second time, astronomers have linked an elusive particle called a high-energy neutrino to an object outside our galaxy. Using ground- and space-based facilities, including NASA s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, they traced the neutrino to a black hole tearing apart a star, a rare cataclysmic occurrence called a tidal disruption event. Astrophysicists have long theorized that tidal disruptions could produce high-energy neutrinos, but this is the first time we ve actually been able to connect them with observational evidence, said Robert Stein, a doctoral student at the German Electron-Synchrotron (DESY) research center in Zeuthen, Germany, and Humboldt University in Berlin. But it seems like this particular event, called AT2019dsg, didn t generate the neutrino when or how