Physicists discover "ghost particle" with the highest energy ever observed on Earth

Scientists have discovered a "ghost particle" with the highest energy ever found on Earth. The researchers do not know where it came from.

The particle, which flashed on the detector at the Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, is a neutrino. It has an energy of 220 quadrillion electron volts, which makes it more than 100 times more powerful than the energy detected so far, LiveScience writes.

The particle's trajectory and energy mean that it probably came from cosmic radiation – subatomic particles such as protons or electrons that were ejected at high speeds somewhere in the universe, physicists speculate. But the nature of the cataclysmic events that gave rise to the particle of enormous energy remains a mystery.

"Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious elementary particles. They have no electric charge, almost no mass, and interact weakly with matter," said Rosa Coniglione, deputy representative of the KM3NeT detector and researcher at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Italy.

"These particles are special cosmic messengers that bring us unique information about the mechanisms involved in the most energetic phenomena and allow us to explore the most remote corners of the Universe," she added.

According to scientists, about 100 billion neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the human body every second. The tiny particles are everywhere and are formed during star explosions, radioactive decay, and in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth.

Despite their omnipresence, the minimal interaction of uncharged and nearly massless particles with other matter makes neutrino detection incredibly difficult, physicists say.

To filter out the lower-energy neutrinos and search for their high-energy cousins, scientists and engineers use the KM3NeT neutrino telescope, which is divided between two detectors located in separate locations on the Mediterranean floor.

Just as an airplane flying at a speed higher than the speed of sound creates an audible rumble, a particle traveling through a light-slowing medium, such as water, at a speed higher than the speed of light creates a faint blue glow, experts explain.

By looking for this glow, called the Cherenkov radiation, scientists can spot traces of by-product particles that form after neutrinos strike an atomic nucleus.

It is unclear where the ultra-high energy neutrinos at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, which were detected by the ARCA detector, came from. Researchers speculate that it could have been accelerated by a "powerful cosmic accelerator" such as a black hole, supernova, or pulsar.

Scientists also think that this may even be the first-ever detection of a "cosmogenic" neutrino, which is the result of cosmic radiation hitting the light of the cosmic microwave background.

To find the answer, scientists will continue to develop KM3NeT, producing a larger detector capable of capturing even more of these rare neutrinos as they pass through our planet.

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