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A neutrino is a fermion that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small (-ino) that it was long thought to be zero. The rest mass of the neutrino is much smaller than that of the other known elementary particles. The weak force has a very short range, the gravitational interaction is extremely weak due to the very small mass of the neutrino, and neutrinos do not participate in the electromagnetic interaction or the strong interaction. Thus, neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.
A neutron star is the collapsed core of a massive supergiant star, which had a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses (M☉), possibly more if the star was especially metal-rich. Except for black holes, neutron stars are the smallest and densest known class of stellar objects. Neutron stars have a radius on the order of 10 kilometers (6 mi) and a mass of about 1.4 M☉. They result from the supernova explosion of a massive star, combined with gravitational collapse, that compresses the core past white dwarf star density to that of atomic nuclei.
A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. A supernova occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. The original object, called the progenitor, either collapses to a neutron star or black hole, or is completely destroyed to form a diffuse nebula. The peak optical luminosity of a supernova can be comparable to that of an entire galaxy before fading over several weeks or months.
A blazar is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) with a relativistic jet directed very nearly towards an observer. Relativistic beaming of electromagnetic radiation from the jet makes blazars appear much brighter than they would be if the jet were pointed in a direction away from Earth. Blazars are powerful sources of emission across the electromagnetic spectrum and are observed to be sources of high-energy gamma ray photons. Blazars are highly variable sources, often undergoing rapid and dramatic fluctuations in brightness on short timescales. Some blazar jets appear to exhibit superluminal motion, another consequence of material in the jet traveling toward the observer at nearly the speed of light.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter. Another instrument aboard Fermi, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, is being used to study gamma-ray bursts and solar flares.
In astroparticle physics, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) is a cosmic ray with an energy greater than 1 EeV (1018 electronvolts, approximately 0.16 joules), far beyond both the rest mass and energies typical of other cosmic ray particles.
Neutrino astronomy is the branch of astronomy that observes astronomical objects with neutrino detectors in special observatories. Neutrinos are created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay, nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the Sun or high energy astrophysical phenomena, in nuclear reactors, or when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. Neutrinos rarely interact with matter, meaning that it is unlikely for them to scatter along their trajectory, unlike photons. Therefore, neutrinos offer a unique opportunity to observe processes that are inaccessible to optical telescopes, such as reactions in the Sun's core. Neutrinos can also offer a very strong pointing direction compared to charged particle cosmic rays.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a neutrino observatory constructed at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The project is a recognized CERN experiment (RE10). Its thousands of sensors are located under the Antarctic ice, distributed over a cubic kilometre.
Paolo Padovani is an Italian astronomer working at the European Southern Observatory, specializing in the study of Active galactic nuclei including the study of quasars and blazars, evolution and multifrequency studies and extragalactic backgrounds. In 2004 he and several other astronomers discovered 30 supermassive blackholes at the European Astrophysical Virtual Observatory using pioneering techniques.
A neutrino detector is a physics apparatus which is designed to study neutrinos. Because neutrinos only weakly interact with other particles of matter, neutrino detectors must be very large to detect a significant number of neutrinos. Neutrino detectors are often built underground, to isolate the detector from cosmic rays and other background radiation. The field of neutrino astronomy is still very much in its infancy – the only confirmed extraterrestrial sources as of 2018 are the Sun and the supernova 1987A in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. Another likely source is the blazar TXS 0506+056 about 3.7 billion light years away. Neutrino observatories will "give astronomers fresh eyes with which to study the universe".
VERITAS is a major ground-based gamma-ray observatory with an array of four 12 meter optical reflectors for gamma-ray astronomy in the GeV – TeV photon energy range. VERITAS uses the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope technique to observe gamma rays that cause particle showers in Earth's atmosphere that are known as extensive air showers. The VERITAS array is located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, in southern Arizona, United States. The VERITAS reflector design is similar to the earlier Whipple 10-meter gamma-ray telescope, located at the same site, but is larger in size and has a longer focal length for better control of optical aberrations. VERITAS consists of an array of imaging telescopes deployed to view atmospheric Cherenkov showers from multiple locations to give the highest sensitivity in the 100 GeV – 10 TeV band. This very high energy observatory, completed in 2007, effectively complements the Large Area Telescope (LAT) of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope due to its larger collection area as well as coverage in a higher energy band.
Extragalactic cosmic rays are very-high-energy particles that flow into the Solar System from beyond the Milky Way galaxy. While at low energies, the majority of cosmic rays originate within the Galaxy (such as from supernova remnants), at high energies the cosmic ray spectrum is dominated by these extragalactic cosmic rays. The exact energy at which the transition from galactic to extragalactic cosmic rays occurs is not clear, but it is in the range 1017 to 1018 eV.
Gravitational-wave astronomy is an emerging field of science, concerning the observations of gravitational waves to collect relatively unique data and make inferences about objects such as neutron stars and black holes, events such as supernovae, and processes including those of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.
A neutron star merger is a type of stellar collision.
A kilonova is a transient astronomical event that occurs in a compact binary system when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge. These mergers are thought to produce gamma-ray bursts and emit bright electromagnetic radiation, called "kilonovae", due to the radioactive decay of heavy r-process nuclei that are produced and ejected fairly isotropically during the merger process. The measured high sphericity of the kilonova AT2017gfo at early epochs was deduced from the blackbody nature of its spectrum.
GW 170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) signal observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating from the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993. The signal was produced by the last minutes of a binary pair of neutron stars' inspiral process, ending with a merger. It is the first GW observation that has been confirmed by non-gravitational means. Unlike the five previous GW detections, which were of merging black holes not expected to produce a detectable electromagnetic signal, the aftermath of this merger was also seen by 70 observatories on 7 continents and in space, across the electromagnetic spectrum, marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy. The discovery and subsequent observations of GW 170817 were given the Breakthrough of the Year award for 2017 by the journal Science.
TXS 0506+056 is a very high energy blazar – a quasar with a relativistic jet pointing directly towards Earth – of BL Lac-type. With a redshift of 0.3365 ± 0.0010, it is about 1.75 gigaparsecs from Earth. Its approximate location on the sky is off the left shoulder of the constellation Orion. Discovered as a radio source in 1983, the blazar has since been observed across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Supernova neutrinos are weakly interactive elementary particles produced during a core-collapse supernova explosion. A massive star collapses at the end of its life, emitting on the order of 1058 neutrinos and antineutrinos in all lepton flavors. The luminosity of different neutrino and antineutrino species are roughly the same. They carry away about 99% of the gravitational energy of the dying star as a burst lasting tens of seconds. The typical supernova neutrino energies are 10 to 20 MeV. Supernovae are considered the strongest and most frequent source of cosmic neutrinos in the MeV energy range.
Laura Maraschi is an Italian astronomer. She works for the Brera Astronomical Observatory. In 2013, she was on the organizing committee of the International Astronomical Union Symposium 304.
GRB 221009A also known as Swift J1913.1+1946 was an unusually bright and long-lasting gamma-ray burst (GRB) jointly discovered by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on October 9, 2022. The gamma-ray burst was around seven minutes long, but was detectable for more than ten hours following initial detection, and for several hours was bright enough in visible frequencies to be observable by amateur astronomers. Despite being over 2 billion light-years away, it was powerful enough to affect Earth's atmosphere, having the strongest effect ever recorded by a gamma-ray burst on the planet. The peak luminosity of GRB 221009A was measured by Konus-Wind to be ∼ 2.1 × 1047 J/s and by Fermi-GBM to be ∼ 1.0 × 1047 J/s over the 1.024s interval. A burst as energetic and as close to Earth as 221009A is thought to be a once-in-10,000-year event. It was the brightest and most energetic gamma-ray burst ever recorded, being deemed the "BOAT", or brightest of all time.
References
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- ↑ Landau, Elizabeth; Chou, Felicia; Washington, Dewayne; Porter, Molly (16 October 2017). "NASA Missions Catch First Light from a Gravitational-Wave Event". NASA . Retrieved 17 October 2017.
- ↑ Albert, A.; et al. (ANTARES, IceCube, and the Pierre Auger Observatory) (16 Oct 2017). "Search for high-energy neutrinos from binary neutron star merger GW170817 with ANTARES, IceCube, and the Pierre Auger Observatory". The Astrophysical Journal. 850 (2): L35. arXiv: 1710.05839 . Bibcode:2017ApJ...850L..35A. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/aa9aed . S2CID 217180814.
- ↑ Starr, Michelle (2020-10-12). "Astronomers Detect Eerie Glow Still Radiating From Neutron Star Collision Years Later". ScienceAlert. Retrieved 2023-01-04.
- ↑ Finkbeiner, A. (2017-09-22). "The New Era of Multimessenger Astronomy". Scientific American. 318 (5): 36–41. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0518-36. PMID 29672499.
- ↑ https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/gcn3/21916.gcn3 [ bare URL plain text file ]
- ↑ Cleary, D. (2018-07-12). "Ghostly particle caught in polar ice ushers in new way to look at the universe". Science. doi:10.1126/science.aau7505. S2CID 126347626.
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- ↑ "ATel #10791: Fermi-LAT detection of increased gamma-ray activity of TXS 0506+056, located inside the IceCube-170922A error region".
- ↑ Mirzoyan, Razmik (2017-10-04). "ATel #10817: First-time detection of VHE gamma rays by MAGIC from a direction consistent with the recent EHE neutrino event IceCube-170922A". Astronomerstelegram.org. Retrieved 2018-07-16.
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- ↑ Overbye, Dennis (July 12, 2018). "It Came From a Black Hole, and Landed in Antarctica - For the first time, astronomers followed cosmic neutrinos into the fire-spitting heart of a supermassive blazar". The New York Times . Retrieved July 13, 2018.
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Kurahashi Neilson first came up with the idea to use cascade neutrinos to map the Milky Way in 2015.
- ↑ Chang, Kenneth (29 June 2023). "Neutrinos Build a Ghostly Map of the Milky Way - Astronomers for the first time detected neutrinos that originated within our local galaxy using a new technique". The New York Times . Archived from the original on 29 June 2023. Retrieved 30 June 2023.
- ↑ IceCube Collaboration (29 June 2023). "Observation of high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane". Science. 380 (6652): 1338–1343. arXiv: 2307.04427 . doi:10.1126/science.adc9818. Archived from the original on 30 June 2023. Retrieved 30 June 2023.
