They detect neutrinos coming from inside the Milky Way – DW – 06/30/2023

he neutrino is a mysterious elementary particle that is very difficult to detect, but for now Scientists For the first time I was able to identify such an emanation from within from the Milky Way And so we see our galaxy in a way we’ve never seen before.

The result reached by a large international team and using machine learning techniques with artificial intelligence to analyze large amounts of data, Posted in Sciences.

The first galactic image made of matter particles

So far, the Milky Way has been observed in a variety of ways, from visible starlight to radio waves, but now scientists have come up with a uniquely different picture. neutrino It is the first image of a galaxy made of matter particles rather than electromagnetic energy.

Neutrinos, known as the ghost particle, have no electrical charge, have minimal mass, and hardly interact with ordinary matter. In fact, billions of them cross the Earth and our bodies every day without us even noticing.

Observing footprints of neutrinos

Observatory ice Cube It is a network of thousands of sensors located deep in the ice of Antarctica, which has been monitoring the traces left by these particles for more than ten years.

With their data, the researchers report the first strong statistical evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from the inner parts of the Milky Way.

“Strong evidence that the Milky Way is a source of high-energy neutrinos has survived rigorous testing,” said Ignacio Tabwada, a Georgia Institute of Technology professor of physics and IceCube spokesperson.

He said in a statement that the next step is to identify specific sources within the galaxy.

IceCube member Chad Finlay of Stockholm University says seeing our own galaxy containing neutrinos is something we “dreamed of but seemed out of the scope of our project for many years.”

“Uncovering the hidden features of our galaxy”

This observatory’s capabilities and new data analysis tools provide an entirely new view of the Milky Way and it is hoped that it will have a higher resolution than ever before, “which can reveal hidden features of our galaxy that humanity has not seen before.” , Dennis Caldwell added, From the National Science Foundation (USA).

It was thought it would take several years of data collection to trace neutrino lines to the Milky Way, but “what made this result possible today is the machine learning revolution,” which allowed us to mine ten years of IceCube data, he added.

Although the IceCube observatory records billions of events each year, only a very small fraction (one in every hundred million recorded events) is due to neutrinos from space, and identifying these neutrinos is a difficult computational task.

deep neural networks

Thanks to the development of new computing techniques called deep neural networks, it is possible to identify these neutrino events 20 times more efficiently than before.

Unlike light of any wavelength, in the case of neutrinos, the universe eclipses nearby sources in our galaxy, explained Francis Halzen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator for IceCube.

For Naoko Kurahashi Nelson of Drexel University (USA), neutrino astronomy will be mastered like the methods that preceded it, so that he can also reveal hitherto unknown aspects of the universe. “That’s why we do what we do,” he says, “to see something no one else has seen before and to understand things we haven’t seen.”

FEW (EFE, National Science Foundation, Sciences)