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.
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Jakob van Santen/Nathan Whitehorn/IceCube

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.

For a long time after it was built, IceCube failed to see any high-energy neutrinos. But in November, the team finally figured out how to hone in on their quarry and discovered two extremely energetic neutrinos, which were nicknamed 'Bert' and 'Ernie,' along with around 25 less-energetic ones. A third high-energy neutrino was found shortly thereafter, and data about it was presented on Apr. 7 at an American Physical Society conference. In keeping with the theme, this latest neutrino is known as Big Bird.

Rather than telling them how to get to Sesame Street, Big Bird the neutrino could point astronomers to distant exotic phenomena in the universe. Energetic processes known as Active Galactic Nuclei and gamma-ray bursts are some of the brightest events seen in the sky. They are also extremely mysterious. Scientists suspect they are powered by supermassive black holes but have yet to understand their mechanics. By providing information about the neutrinos produced in such events, IceCube could help physicists figure out how they work.