An extremely high -energy part that was detected through the Earth has left scientists bewildered since it was discovered. While many researchers believe that the particle was an unusual neutrino, some now suggest that it can be something more wild: a part of dark matter that travels through the cosmos.
The KM3net detector, off the coast of Italy, saw this “impossible” neutrino in 2023 while still under construction. The particle in question was of immense proportions, 35 times more energetic than anyone seen before. Where it comes from, it is still a mystery, with possible sources that include a galaxy with a very active central black hole known as Blazar, or a background source of high -energy neutrinos that pervalted the universe.
BHUPAL DEV at the University of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues have another idea. They suggest that the event could not have a leg a neutrino at all, but insults a dark matter that crashes against our planet that originated in a blazar. “It opens in a new way that you can really try dark matter,” he says. “We can turn these neutrinos telescopes into dark matter detectors.”
Neutrin detectors already have a difficult job because these parts are extremely small and almost without mass, they rarely interact with matter as the cosmos are going through. When they reach the earth, they can occasionally collide against atoms, producing a particle called a muón that can be collected by neutrin detectors such as km3net and Icecube in the South Pole.
Icecube has seen evidence of hundreds of cosmic neutrinos since 2011, but never something as energetic as the discovery of KM3nets. That was confusing, because any source that Km3net was seeing, Icecube should also have seen it.
Dev says that if incoming participation was a dark matter and not a neutrino, this mystery could explain. The rare predicted path of the incoming part meant that he had to travel through more than the earth to reach km3net than Icecube, increasing the possibilities of disperse in a muon. “The dark matter goes through a lot of matter of the earth,” says Dev, “and we can explain why Icecube did not see it.”
The part would have a leg produced in a blazar and then fired towards the earth on a beam. DEV favors this idea because high energy protons in a blazar transfer their energy more efficiently to dark matter that neutrons, he says. The vast majority of the other events detected by KM3net and Icecube would still have been neutrinos.
Not everyone is still convinced. “From the perspective of a Affair razor from Occam, this is probably just an ordinary neutrino that is exceptional in energy,” says Dan Hooper at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. However, if correct, it would give us a method to find and study darkening matters, which have never been previously detected. “Everyone would be quite excited if these machines can study not only neutrinos but also dark matter,” says Hooper.
Shirley Li, from the University of California, Irvine, says that the idea could be tested in the future, since any incoming part of dark matter should produce two muons in the detector when the earth hits the earth, but detectors currently lack the precision at distance. “That is potentially verifiable, but in the thesis of the reconstruction of Mones it is very difficult,” she says.