Alien from deep space: physicists have discovered a ghostly particle with the highest energy ever recorded.

Physicists, using the KM3NeT neutrino telescope located on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, have discovered a ghostly particle, or neutrino, with the highest energy among all known. This elementary particle arrived on Earth nearly at the speed of light from beyond the Milky Way. Scientists have identified 12 potential sources of this neutrino. The research has been published in the journal Nature, reports Space.

Neutrinos are often referred to as ghost particles because they have no charge and possess an extremely small mass, making them very difficult to detect. Despite this, neutrinos pass through almost any object in the universe at nearly the speed of light. Approximately 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second.

At the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, at a depth of 3,450 meters, lies the KM3NeT neutrino telescope, composed of thousands of sensors to register neutrinos. This underwater detector identified a flash of light produced by a muon particle, but the characteristics of this particle indicate that it was created when a neutrino with extremely high energy collided with another elementary particle.

Physicists determined the energy of the neutrino based on the amount of light recorded by the underwater detector. It turned out that the energy of the neutrino is 220 million billion electron volts. This is 30,000 times greater than what particles can achieve when accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider. To attain such energy, a particle in the largest particle accelerator on Earth, which is 27 km long, would need to be the length of Earth's equator, that is, 40,000 km.

Scientists believe that the highest energy neutrino originated from beyond the Milky Way, and physicists have identified 12 potential sources for this particle. It is suggested that it may come from one of the 12 blazars, which are objects associated with supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. These black holes often create very bright quasars by actively consuming matter, and they emit jets of plasma that can stretch for hundreds of light-years. If such a jet is directed towards Earth, the object is referred to as a blazar.

These jets also consist of high-energy particles known as cosmic rays and powerful electromagnetic radiation. When cosmic ray particles collide with other elementary particles in the galaxy, they send out streams of high-energy neutrinos.

However, physicists also consider that the detected highest energy neutrino could have originated from the collision of protons from cosmic rays with a photon in the cosmic microwave background radiation. This radiation emerged shortly after the Big Bang when photons, or light particles, began to move freely through the universe.

If this last theory is correct, physicists would have discovered cosmic neutrinos for the first time. Such particles are believed to exist, but they have never been detected before.