Crowns of supermassive black holes can be sources of cosmic neutrinos
(ORDO NEWS) — The origin of high-energy space neutrinos observed with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, whose detectors are located in the thickness of the Antarctic ice, is a big mystery for physicists and astronomers.
The new model can help explain the unexpectedly powerful flux of such neutrinos in a certain energy range, recorded recently in conjunction with gamma radiation. This model, described in a new scientific work, points to supermassive black holes located in the centers of active galaxies as possible sources of these mysterious neutrinos.
“Neutrinos are subatomic particles so tiny that their mass is close to zero and they rarely interact with other matter,” said Kohta Murase, assistant professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and an employee Center for Multichannel Astrophysics, Institute of Gravity and Space, who led this study. – High-energy cosmic neutrinos form in natural “particle accelerators,” such as neutron stars and black holes. They are accompanied by high-energy gamma radiation and sometimes even gravitational waves.”
Recently, however, the Fermi Space Gamma Observatory (Fermi) recorded an unexpectedly intense neutrino flux having an average energy for the gamma range (less than 100 tera-electron-volts), against the background of a relatively weak gamma ray flux corresponding to this neutrino flux. To explain these observations, in his work, Murase and colleagues propose a model according to which these neutrinos are emitted in the corona of a supermassive black hole, which is a zone with high emissivity that forms above the accretion disk of the black hole. Very high-energy gamma radiation emitted by the corona is absorbed and re-emitted with lower energy by the material surrounding the black hole, after which it reaches the Earth as a neutrino stream with an energy of less than 100 TeV,
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