Tracing a neutrino ghost to a distant 'shadow blaster' galaxy

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Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles of the universe. They live a ghostly existence with no electric charge, very little mass and extremely few interactions with matter. They are also the most abundant particles with mass in the universe and can be created through a variety of processes, such as the decay of heavy particles, nuclear reactions in the sun and the explosions of stars.

Instruments on Earth have detected high-energy neutrinos arriving from space since the 1960s, and identifying their origin has been a longstanding challenge in astronomy. While scientists have identified a small number of nearby neutrino sources, they cannot account for the total number of neutrinos our instruments measure arriving from across the universe, referred to as the cosmic neutrino background. Astronomers therefore suspect that other major source populations exist but remain hidden.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, a team led by Yuji Urata of MITOS Science Co. LTD. in Taiwan presents the analysis of a new neutrino source candidate—an extremely bright galaxy, JCMT0402−0424, nicknamed "Shadow Blaster." This galaxy is located about 11 billion light-years away, has trillions of times the luminosity of the sun in the infrared and may provide the long-sought link between high-energy neutrino production and distant star-forming galaxies.

The discovery was made in part using observations from the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. The study also used observations from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), operated by the East Asian Observatory, and the Submillimeter Array (SMA), a joint operation between the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. All three telescopes are on the summit of Maunakea in Hawai'i.

In 2021, the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica alerted the scientific community to a high-energy neutrino event, dubbed IC 210922A, coming from a region of space in the direction of the constellation Eridanus. This alert triggered rapid follow-up observations across the electromagnetic spectrum to search for a counterpart signal that—if detected—could help identify the neutrino's source.

Then, a couple of days after the initial alert, Urata and his team initiated observations with JCMT and SMA and discovered Shadow Blaster, whose location and