WN@tL: This Summer's Breakthrough in Multi-Messenger Astronomy
August 29 - 7:00PM - 8:15PM
UW Biotechnology Center, 425 Henry Mall, Room 1111, Madison, WI 53706
Cost: Free
Speakers
Justin Vanderbrouke, Physics & WiPAC
About the talk
July 18, 2018, scientists announced the 1st known source for ghostly, high-energy neutrinos. The source is a blazar, a billion-solar-mass black hole 3.7 billion light-years away. The discovery establishes a new way to study the universe.
About four billion years ago, when the planet Earth was still in its infancy, the axis of a black hole about one billion times more massive than the sun happened to be pointing right to where our planet was going to be on September 22, 2017.
Along the axis, a high-energy jet of particles sent photons and neutrinos racing in our direction at or near the speed of light. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, [designed and operated by scientists at the University of Wisconsin Madison], detected one of these subatomic particles – the IceCube-170922A neutrino – and traced it back to a small patch of sky in the constellation Orion and pinpointed the cosmic source: a flaring black hole the size of a billion suns, 3.7 billion light-years from Earth, known as blazar TXS 0506+056. Blazars have been known about for some time. What wasn’t clear was that they could produce high-energy neutrinos. Even more exciting was such neutrinos had never before been traced to its source.
Finding the cosmic source of high-energy neutrinos for the first time, announced on July 12, 2018, by the National Science Foundation, marks the dawn of a new era of neutrino astronomy. Pursued in fits and starts since 1976, when pioneering physicists first tried to build a large-scale high-energy neutrino detector off the Hawaiian coast, IceCube’s discovery marks the triumphant conclusion of a long and difficult campaign by many hundreds of scientists and engineers – and simultaneously the birth of a completely new branch of astronomy.
See EarthSky.org: http://earthsky.org/space/icecube-observatory-detects-neutrino-blazar-source
By Doug Cowen, Pennsylvania State University; Azadeh Keivani, Columbia University, and Derek Fox, Pennsylvania State University
About the speakers
Parking Information
Parking is available in Lot 20, located at 1390 University Avenue. Lot 20 is a three-level parking structure on the right side of University Avenue, just before Henry Mall. Lot 20 is attached to the Genetics/Biotechnology Center.
Parking in Lot 20 is one of the most convenient parking experiences on campus. Park on the top level, and you can enter the building without going up any steps. Convenient, close and step-free parking are three big reasons we hold WN@tL at the Genetics/Biotechnology Center.
Questions?
