‘Tis the season for reviewing the interesting scientific discoveries that occurred in 2020. I took a look at Science News, and found a few stories that caught my attention. Despite the charisma of the Elvis worms, I opted to cover a neutrino observed in Antarctica on October 1, 2019.
Neutrinos, of course, are ghostly particles that have almost no mass and only weakly interact with particles of ordinary matter. Billions of neutrinos are passing through your body at any moment, and for the most part, they do nothing—except very rarely, when they will convert a proton to a neutron, or vice versa.
So , what was so special about this neutrino detected in Antarctica? Two things. It was determined to be extremely energetic, to the tune of 200 trillion electron-volts. That’s 30 times the energy that the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the planet, can give to a proton. So when this neutrino was observed, a natural question to ask was: what caused this neutrino to become so energetic?
Which leads to the second special thing about this observation. Since the neutrino came to Earth from space, the scientists looked to see if there had been an event that was happening in the region of the sky from whence the neutrino came. Since neutrinos travel at nearly the speed of light, it is extremely likely that the event that caused the neutrino to become energetic would also leave a visible signature in the sky. As it happened, there was such a signature, a “tidal disruption event” called AT2019asg. Light from every region of the electromagnetic spectrum had been observed from this source since April of 2019, and was still emitting in October, months later. This radiation is the result of a black hole shredding and consuming a star.
It was calculated that the probability that the energetic neutrino and the black hole eating the star are coincidence is 0.2 %. “Pretty good!” you might say, but not if you’re a physicist. You need better proof than that to be confident that the two events are related. But this raises the possibility that the act of a black hole shredding a star is capable of accelerating neutrinos to unprecedented energies. More data is needed to confirm this hypothesis, and because neutrino observations are quite rare, it will take quite while to do so. Stay tuned.
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Top Comments (December 26, 2020):
No nominations tonight, but...
From Fffflats:
This comment by hopeful4life in Ian Reifowitz’ post on the disgraceful history of the GOP over the past 50 years or so. Showing extremes can be mollified through fair elections rid of gerrymander. This is particularly hopeful considering the comment to the article in which it resides either complain of Republican extremists, or advocate for left pulling extremes.
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Top Photos (December 25, 2020):
Tonight’s picture quilt is courtesy of jotter!