Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2016 Apr 28
Nearly 10 billion years ago in a galaxy known as PKS B1424-418, a dramatic explosion occurred. Light from this blast began arriving at Earth in 2012. Now, an international team of astronomers, including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, have shown that a record-breaking neutrino seen around the same time likely was born in the same event. ...
[img3="Fermi LAT images showing the gamma-ray sky around the blazar PKS B1424-418. Brighter colors indicate greater numbers of gamma rays. The dashed arc marks part of the source region established by IceCube for the Big Bird neutrino. Left: An average of LAT data centered on July 8, 2011 covering 300 days when the blazar was inactive. Right: An average of 300 active days centered on Feb. 27, 2013, when PKS B1424-418 was the brightest blazar in this part of the sky. (Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration)"]http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/3574843/zoom.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Neutrinos are the fastest, lightest and most unsociable understood fundamental particles, and scientists are just now capable of detecting high-energy ones arriving from deep space. The present work provides the first plausible association between a single extragalactic object and one of these cosmic neutrinos. ...
Recently, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole found first evidence for a flux of extraterrestrial neutrinos ... On Dec. 4, 2012, IceCube detected an event known as Big Bird, a neutrino with an energy exceeding 2 quadrillion electron volts (PeV). ... The best IceCube position only narrowed the source to a patch of the southern sky about 32 degrees across ...
Starting in the summer of 2012, NASA’s Fermi satellite witnessed a dramatic brightening of PKS B1424-418, an active galaxy classified as a gamma-ray blazar. ... During the year-long outburst, PKS B1424-418 shone between 15 and 30 times brighter in gamma rays than its average before the eruption. The blazar is located within the Big Bird source region, but then so are many other active galaxies detected by Fermi. ...
The scientists searching for the neutrino source then turned to data from a long-term observing program named TANAMI. ... Three radio observations between 2011 and 2013 cover the period of the Fermi outburst. They reveal that the core of the galaxy's jet had been brightening by about four times. ...
In a paper published Monday, April 18, in Nature Physics, the team suggests the PKS B1424-418 outburst and Big Bird are linked, calculating only a 5-percent probability the two events occurred by chance alone. ...
Coincidence of a high-fluence blazar outburst with a PeV-energy neutrino event - M. Kadler et al
- Nature Physics (online 18 Apr 2016) DOI: 10.1038/nphys3715
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1602.02012 > 05 Feb 2016 (v1), 03 Mar 2016 (v2)