(from http://www.nbcnews.com/science/alien-neutrinos-reveal-new-frontier-astronomy-antarcticas-icecube-2D116241930
A collection of 28 weird high-energy neutrino hits from far beyond the solar system represents the beginning of a new age of astronomy — and the new neutrino astronomers say they already have more data yet to report.
"This is something we've launched now," the University of Wisconsin's Francis Halzen, principal investigator for the international IceCube observatory in Antarctica, told NBC News. "We're on a mission, so I don't think there's any time for relaxing."
IceCube is the world's biggest neutrino detector, drawing data from light sensors buried within a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole. It's taken 15 years for the observatory to get from the drawing board and through its construction phase to this point: In this week's issue of the journal Science, Halzen and hundreds of other researchers in the IceCube collaboration report the first big batch of high-energy neutrinos traced to cosmic sources.
How high-energy? Beyond a quadrillion electron volts, or nearly 100 times more energetic than anything that can be smashed up in the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. If scientists can reliably trace these neutrinos to their source, they could lead to new maps of the cosmos — and unlock longstanding mysteries of the universe.
"The belief is that the very luminous and energetic sources which produce the highest-energy cosmic rays are also supposed to produce high-energy neutrinos," IceCube spokeswoman Olga Botner of Uppsala University said in a Science video. "We sincerely hope that the neutrinos we have now observed come from these sources, and within a small amount of time we'll be able to perhaps solve the 100-year-old riddle of the origin of cosmic rays." . . .
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