Record-Breaking Neutrino is Most Energetic Ever Detected

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Record-breaking neutrino is most energetic ever detected:

Highest energy cosmic neutrino so far 120PeV (120x10¹⁵eV)

Astrophysicists have observed the most energetic neutrino ever. The particle - which probably came from a distant galaxy - was spotted by the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), a collection of light-detecting glass spheres on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, on 13 February 2023. Researchers monitoring the telescope did not notice the detection until early 2024, when they completed the first analysis of their data. They unveiled it as a potentially record event last year at a conference in Milan, Italy, but did not disclose details such as the timing, direction or energy of the neutrino.

"We had to convince ourselves that it wasn't something strange or weird with the telescope," says Paschal Coyle, a neutrino physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France and KM3NeT spokesperson. The result was published on 12 February in Nature1, and will be described in four preprints due to be posted on the arXiv preprint server.

Neutrinos are electrically neutral particles more than one million times lighter than an electron. They are typically produced in nuclear reactions such as those at the centre of the Sun, from which they emerge with energies on the order of millions of electronvolts (106 eV). But for more than 10 years, researchers have been recording neutrinos carrying unprecedented energies of up to several quadrillion electronvolts (1015 eV, or 1 petaelectronvolt), which are thought to originate in distant galaxies. (The most energetic particle ever detected, at 320,000 PeV, was not a neutrino but a cosmic ray dubbed the Oh-My-God particle.)

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