Science Graphic of the Week: Capturing a Super Energetic Neutrino Named Big Bird
You’re looking at a neutrino named Big Bird. This particle, which has an energy 1,000 times that of the protons smashed together at the LHC, traveled across the universe before hitting an atom at the South Pole and being recorded at an enormous underground observatory named IceCube.
Neutrinos are tiny ghostly particles. Billions of them are right now streaming through your body without interacting with anything. In order to capture one, researchers built a gargantuan detector at the South Pole buried under a mile of ice. The IceCube neutrino telescope consists of 5,160 light-sensitive diodes that sit frozen in darkness until one of the trillions of neutrinos moving through the observatory happens to hit an oxygen atom in the ice. This releases a flash of blue light, as well as other radiation, which is recorded by the sensors and can tell scientists the direction and energy of the original neutrino. The red region in the image above is the spot where the neutrino hit while the other colors show detectors that were triggered by the secondary radiation.
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