Ultra-highenergy Cosmic ray accelerators - A multi-experiment observation.

Hi Everyone, today there was a NSF announcement from the Icecube detector at the south pole. It was an important announcement as it represents an example of combination of several datasets across different detectors/experiments which directly confirm each other's physics cases and adds firm evidence for what scientists had previously believed could be producing ultra high energy cosmic rays... that is, cosmic accelerators such as blackholes. Scientists have a tricky time explaining the sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, as the actual candidate sources are pretty much tied to compact gravitational objects or supernovae.

Here is the announcement livestream. It starts about, 40 mins in?


What they announced is observing a super high energy neutrino event in the IceCube detector built into the ice in Antarctica. It was a high energy muon event that lit up the whole detector, allowing very good reconstruction of its direction and energy.

This data was sent to the FERMI-LAT collaboration who are looking for high energy gamma rays. They found that the direction of the cosmic ray was an active galactic nuclei that FERMI had been observing going through previous flare activity. The peak of that activity coming after the neutrino activity. The same event trigger was sent to the MAGIC collaboration, who span their telescopes around and also made observations of the gamma ray activity lighting up the atmosphere.

It gives us a look at what is happening when a super massive black hole is 'active' and probably accreting material and producing super high energy flares. We now have a better handle on what is happening than simple text book "we think this is what is going on"

There is a really great part of the stream at 1:11:06 in which the source is shown in Gamma, Xrays, Optical and Radio... so we now have an extra dataset, observations across the whole EM spectrum, and now also in physical particles too.

Im still watching the stream, so iv just posted up the link and will come back for more discussion (should their be any)

a reply to: ErosA433


Here is nice overview of high energy neutrinos at quantamagazine.org.

Neutrinos Linked With Cosmic Source for the First Time.

This is another great example of multiple instruments being focused upon the same target in multiple wavelengths to confirm observations. Just like the neutron star merger. It will probably be the way astronomy is carried out from now on.

Imagine the energy a particle must gain while it tries to escape that gravity well. If time is slowed down in the presence of a massive object, then as a particle escapes from the gravity field of that object, time would speed up and it would gain energy.

The acceleration is believed to take place in the shock front of the polar jets rather than directly in the accretion disks of these super massive black holes. It points at the object and the physics occurring as being quite magnificently powerful.