Felipe Pedreros, IceCube/NSF
Neutrinos are minuscule particles that rarely interact with other matter and skim unimpeded through Earth – and us – at a rate of trillions per second. We’ve detected the signatures of neutrinos from space with a vast range of energies, but we don’t know precisely where they come from.
Now, Andrea Palladino and Walter Winter at the German Electron Synchrotron in Zeuthen have devised a model that explains where neutrinos come from based on their energies and the directions they traveled to Earth.
They used data from IceCube, the world’s largest neutrino detector, which resides beneath the ice in Antarctica. Instead of assuming that all neutrinos are created in the same type of environment, as many have, Palladino and Winter found that four sources can account for the different energy levels and abundances of the particles.
“The neutrinos that we’ve detected at IceCube are unlikely to have