SeedOnTheWind

Disclaimer I do Cosmic Ray research not neutrinos, but the idea is that the only way to produce neutrinos at this energy is for a very high energy cosmic ray to hit something and create a neutrino.

Since a lot of neutrinos are coming from one area, and because they have very nearly exactly the same distribution of energies as cosmic rays do (energy spectrum) this really looks like they are coming from strong a cosmic ray source.

Edit: a word

Hello IceCube! Congratulations this is a big step forward.

My question is whether there is a physical motivation for the ‘neutrino burst’ that the legacy data search was based on. As in, what properties of the source dynamics could have caused the increased production of neutrinos in this extended period. Are their any hints in the optical data from other observatories that would suggest something special about this time period?

Thanks!

This is actually interesting given that they have at ~1eV per cubic cm energy density in interstellar space which is roughly 3 times as much as decently energetic photons which makes them the most abundant external source of energy away from stars.

Maybe you could use capture it in the form of heat via calorimetric approach (put a lot of matter in the way to absorb all the particle energy), but it’s too tiny of an amount of energy to be practical.

Interestingly though, this source of energy very well could be the source responsible for the formation of the building blocks of life (ie nucleic acids).