Scientists trace high-energy ghost particles to a ‘Shadow Blaster’ galaxy.

Astronomers have been able to trace a high-energy ‘ghost particle’ back to the Shadow Blaster, a star-forming galaxy located 11 billion light-years away. This means that this particle, the neutrino, has been traveling to us since the universe was 13.8 billion years old, and it is about 3 billion years old.

This discovery provides the first evidence of star formation Galaxies Like the Shadow Blaster, he plays an important role in filling the universe with mysterious, high-energy cosmic ghosts.Neutrinos. These particles get their scary nickname because they have no mass or electrical charge, they pass through matter with little interaction while moving at almost no speed. Speed ​​of light. To illustrate, when you read the previous sentence, more than 65 billion neutrinos stream through every square inch of your body; That’s about 100 billion per square centimeter.

Despite the difficulty associated with detecting such particles, humanity has been able to detect neutrinos since the 1960s, but only a few sources of these particles have been identified. Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the universe after photons, particles of light, and specific sources are not close enough to explain this abundance. This has prompted a search for other hidden neutrino sources, especially those that can accelerate neutrinos to high energies. Now, this research has led to the identification of the incredibly bright Shadow Blaster galaxy, officially designated JCMT0402−0424, which luminesces in the infrared, as a possible source of the neutrino.

“Shadow Blaster has the kind of dense, gas-rich environment that theoretical models have long suggested could efficiently produce high-energy neutrinos,” said Yuji Urata of MITOS Science Co., LTD. In Taiwan He said in a statement. “If confirmed, Shadow Blaster would be the first single star-forming dust galaxy ever directly associated with a high-energy neutrino event.”