About a trillion tiny particles called neutrinos pass through you every second. Created during the Big Bang, these “relic” neutrinos exist throughout the entire universe, but they can’t harm you. In fact, only one of them is likely to lightly tap an atom in your body in your entire lifetime.
Most neutrinos produced by objects such as black holes have much more energy than the relic neutrinos floating through space. While much rarer, these energetic neutrinos are more likely to crash into something and create a signal that physicists like me can detect. But to detect them, neutrino physicists have had to build very large experiments.
IceCube, one such experiment, documented an especially rare type of particularly energetic astrophysical neutrino in a study published in April 2024. These energetic neutrinos often masquerade as other, more common types of neutrino. But for the first time, my colleagues and I managed to ...
