Ground-breaking discovery of 'ghostly' particles from Milky way stuns scientists

Invisible neutrinos are subatomic particles that are emitted by the reactions that power stars and they are extremely difficult to detect on Earth.

Neutrinos differ fundamentally from other electromagnetic sources like radio waves, gamma-rays, microwaves, ultraviolet, infrared and X-rays. We can measure these sources with various instruments. Neutrinos surround us in vast quantities, but usually pass straight through Earth at the speed of light without us being able to detect them at all.

So, scientists and engineers created a massive detector called IceCube at the South Pole. This detector is composed of more than 5,000 sensors buried deep under a cubic kilometre of pristine ice and attached together.

Additionally, scientists employed cutting-edge machine learning algorithms in order to sort the neutrons from the vast shower of other particles that constantly shoot straight through Earth.

IceCube detected neutrinos whenever the high-energy particles interacted with one of the billions of ice molecules over a span of a decade. Then scientists traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way.

As a result, scientists have now got an entirely new window on our Galaxy.

This remarkable achievement comes almost a century after Edwin Hubble discovered that the Milky Way was just one of millions of galaxies in the Universe. It can be said that scientists will be able to carry out a more robust examination of the universe by studying neutrinos more closely as several aspects of the universe are indecipherable using light alone.

According to the ABC News report, IceCube research’s spokesperson has described the observation as “groundbreaking.” He said, "This observation is groundbreaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation."