For more than a decade, floating cranes have a strange load of a strange load of about 3000 meters below the Mediterranean Sea. The objects are seen from another world: large and bright spheres full of electronics. In fact, they are detectors for a machine called KM3net, designed to look for one of the most mysterious fundamental particles.
The machine is still several years after the end, so Paschal Coyle was surprised when, in 2023, he saw a dramatic signal in his preliminary data. It was a neutrino, as expected, but a different from everything they have soar before. “When I tried to see this event for the first time, my program crashed,” says Coyle, a physicist at the Marseille Party Physics Center, France.
Km3net had detected a neutrino of space that had approximately 35 times more energy than any sea before. It was thousands of times more energetic than anything created in our best particle accelerators. Neutrinos have always challenged easy understanding: they interact so weakly with another matter that their presence is normally almost imperceptible. That is behind the decision to place the project detectors at the bottom of the sea. But this seemed almost impossible.
Now the race is underway to solve what in the universe could have produced. As astronomers analyze the details, it seems that there are two possibilities, both or that point towards some of the deepest and most strange scopes of the cosmos. There is much at stake, since understanding the origins of this part can help us overcome the true nature of the neutrinos and reveal the …
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