NASA Telescopes Find Black Hole May Be a Neutrino Factory

[bystander]

NASA X-ray Telescopes Find Black Hole May Be a Neutrino Factory
NASA | Swift | NuSTAR | Chandra | 2014 Nov 13

[b][i]Sgr A* - Credit: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Wisconsin/Y. Bai. et al.[/i][/b]

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The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be producing mysterious particles called neutrinos. If confirmed, this would be the first time that scientists have traced neutrinos back to a black hole.

The evidence for this came from three NASA satellites that observe in X-ray light: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Swift gamma-ray mission, and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR).

Neutrinos are tiny particles that carry no charge and interact very weakly with electrons and protons. Unlike light or charged particles, neutrinos can emerge from deep within their cosmic sources and travel across the universe without being absorbed by intervening matter or, in the case of charged particles, deflected by magnetic fields.

The Earth is constantly bombarded with neutrinos from the sun. However, neutrinos from beyond the solar system can be millions or billions of times more energetic. Scientists have long been searching for the origin of ultra-high energy and very high-energy neutrinos.

"Figuring out where high-energy neutrinos come from is one of the biggest problems in astrophysics today," said Yang Bai of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who co-authored a study about these results published in Physical Review D. "We now have the first evidence that an astronomical source – the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole – may be producing these very energetic neutrinos." ...

Neutrino Lighthouse at Sagittarius A* - Y. Bai et al

• Physical Review D 90 063012 (24 Sep 2014) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.90.063012
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1407.2243 > 08 Jul 2014

[saturno2]

This discovery is important, because
it would have found a massive neutrino source
and change the theory of black holes.

[Markus Schwarz]

This discovery is important, because
it would have found a massive neutrino source
and change the theory of black holes.

I agree with you that this is an important finding. But keep in mind that the authors claim evidence, not proof, that high energetic neutrinos originate from the vicinity of the black hole. Close to a black hole particles reach such high energies that nucleons, or in this case, protons collide with each other and produce secondary particles. These particles then decay, among other particles, into neutrinos (similar to what we do on Earth with particle colliders, such as the LHC). What the authors have found is that the detection of neutrinos on Earth coming from the direction of the central black hole of the Milky Way (see IceCube experiment) is sometimes correlated with activities seen by other experiments. So I would say that these findings consolidate our knowledge about black holes, rather than change it.