Scientists trace high-energy ghost particle to the ‘Shadow Blaster’ galaxy

Astronomers have traced a high-energy “ghost particle” back to Shadow Blaster, a star-forming galaxy located 11 billion light-years away. That means that this particle, a neutrino, had been travelling to us ever since the 13.8 billion year-old universe was just around 3 billion years old.

The discovery offers the first evidence that star-forming galaxies like Shadow Blaster play a significant role in populating the universe with mysterious high-energy cosmic ghost-neutrinos. These particles get their spooky nickname because, possessing virtually no mass and no electric charge, they pass through matter with little to no interaction while moving at nearly the speed of light. For context, as you read the preceding sentence, over 65 billion neutrinos streamed through every square inch of your body; that’s about 100 billion per square centimeter.

Despite the difficulty associated with detecting such particles, humanity has been spotting neutrinos since the 1960s, but only a few sources of these particles have been identified. Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the cosmos after photons, particles of light, and the identified sources are nowhere near enough to account for this abundance. That has prompted the search for other, hidden neutrino sources, especially those which can accelerate neutrinos to high energies. Now that hunt has led to the identification of the incredibly bright Shadow Blaster galaxy, officially designated JCMT0402−0424, which shines in infrared, as a potential neutrino source.

“Shadow Blaster possesses the kind of dense, gas-rich environment that theoretical models have long suggested could efficiently produce high-energy neutrinos,” Yuji Urata of MITOS Science Co., LTD. in Taiwan said in a statement. “If confirmed, Shadow Blaster would be the first-ever individual dusty star-forming galaxy directly linked to a high-energy neutrino event.”