Source of cosmic 'ghost' particle revealed By Mary Halton Science reporter, BBC News

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Ghost-like particles known as neutrinos have been puzzling scientists for decades.
Part of the family of fundamental particles that make up all known matter, neutrinos hurtle unimpeded through the Universe, interacting with almost nothing.
The majority shoot right through the Earth as though it isn't even there, making them exceptionally difficult to detect and study.
Despite this, researchers have worked out that many are created by the Sun and even in our own atmosphere. But the source of one high energy group, known as cosmic neutrinos, has remained particularly elusive.
Now, in the first discovery of its kind, it turns out that a distant galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole may be shooting a beam of these cosmic neutrinos straight towards Earth.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44786125

 

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quantamagazine.org : Neutrinos Linked With Cosmic Source for the First Time

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When the neutrino arrived, Albrecht Karle, a leader of the IceCube experiment, was in his office at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, preparing for his November trip to the South Pole. IceCube detects more than 50,000 neutrino candidates every year, but only about 10 of them are at the very high energies that indicate that they come from outside the Milky Way galaxy. When the detector spots a candidate high-energy neutrino, within minutes it sends an alert to members of the team and to observatories around the world.

The alert that popped up on Karle’s computer said that the candidate neutrino, dubbed IceCube-170922A, carried around 300 teraelectron-volts of energy, more than 40 times the energy of the protons produced by the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. “I am normally not easy to get excited, but this one smells right,” Karle said to Elisa Bernardini, an astroparticle physicist at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Enter Fermi. When IceCube spotted the neutrino, the space-based Fermi Large Area Telescope happened to be scanning the area of the sky from which it appeared. It also recorded an unusually intense flare of gamma radiation. Ojha works with the Fermi telescope, and when IceCube’s alert landed in his inbox, he “straightaway knew that that was something interesting.” Sure enough, he found a match. There, a bit to the west of Bellatrix, a star in the constellation Orion, lives a blazar dubbed TXS 0506+056.
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