"Part of this improvement came from enhanced techniques and part from a careful update of the detector calibration," says Taboada. These findings represent a significant improvement on a prior study on NGC 1068 published in 2020, according to Ignacio Taboada, a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the spokesperson of the IceCube Collaboration. A new view will certainly bring new insights," says Glauch. "It is already a very well-studied object for astronomers, and neutrinos will allow us to see this galaxy in a totally different way. The detection of the second source of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays is the result of over 30 years of scientific exploration, with continuous support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) since the 1990s. NGC 1068 could become a standard candle for future neutrino telescopes, according to Theo Glauch, a postdoctoral associate at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), in Germany, and another main analyzer. "This neutrino detection from the core of NGC 1068 will improve our understanding of the environments around supermassive black holes." "Recent models of the black hole environments in these objects suggest that gas, dust, and radiation should block the gamma rays that would otherwise accompany the neutrinos," says Hans Niederhausen, a postdoctoral associate at Michigan State University and one of the main analyzers of the paper. In a Seyfert II galaxy, a torus of nuclear dust obscures most of the high-energy radiation produced by the dense mass of gas and particles that slowly spiral inward toward the center of the galaxy. NGC 1068 is an active galaxy-a Seyfert II type in particular-seen from Earth at an angle that obscures its central region where the black hole is located. However, unlike the Milky Way, NGC 1068 is an active galaxy where most radiation is not produced by stars but due to material falling into a black hole millions of times more massive than our sun and even more massive than the inactive black hole in the center of our galaxy. Credit: Martin Wolf, IceCube/NSFĪs is the case with our home galaxy, the Milky Way, NGC 1068 is a barred spiral galaxy, with loosely wound arms and a relatively small central bulge. National Science Foundation," says Denise Caldwell, director of NSF's Physics Division.įront view of the IceCube Lab at twilight, with a starry sky showing a glimpse of the Milky Way overhead and sunlight lingering on the horizon. "Answering these far-reaching questions about the universe that we live in is a primary focus of the U.S. Neutrinos could be key to our queries about the workings of the most extreme objects in the cosmos. Although scientists envisioned neutrino astronomy more than 60 years ago, the weak interaction of neutrinos with matter and radiation makes their detection extremely difficult. Unlike light, neutrinos can escape in large numbers from extremely dense environments in the universe and reach Earth largely undisturbed by matter and the electromagnetic fields that permeate extragalactic space. He adds, "IceCube has accumulated some 80 neutrinos of teraelectronvolt energy from NGC 1068, which are not yet enough to answer all our questions, but they definitely are the next big step towards the realization of neutrino astronomy." But only an observation with multiple neutrinos will reveal the obscured core of the most energetic cosmic objects," says Francis Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of IceCube. Credit: Diogo da Cruz, with sound by Fallon Mayanja and voice by Georgia Kaw This video illustrates how IceCube neutrinos have given us a first glimpse into the inner depths of the active galaxy, NGC 1068.
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