alt Hacker NewsAll these high energy particles travel at tremendous speeds, and for them it looks like you traveled half the Universe in a fraction of a second. And then you've hit an Antarctic ice. I think I'd be extremely excited at this, because I'm sure any particle dreams about becoming alive, and falling on Earth give pretty solid chances to integrate into a living organism. And even maybe to fly to the Moon then, to build a base there! I always wonder what are they... I can't stand these romantic stories without knowing more about the heroes.
Is there any hope to have know more about them? To point at some and say "they are neutrinos" is a big promising step, but what about others? Was it a proton, or neutron, or electron or what? Where did this particle come from, and who was so pissed off to kick it that hard. I mean, I read wikipedia a lot, I have an idea what kind of processes can create these particles, but if we could find an extremely red shifted galaxy on a photo from James Webb and say that THAT proton came from there, it would be very nice.
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Particles don't like being anthropomorphized.
To be clear, the detection here is of a mundane cosmic ray that started interacting in the upper atmosphere, but came at such an angle (and the Antarctic plateau is high enough) that the cascade it started continued into the ice.
But yes, one of the main reasons we are looking for ultra-energetic neutrinos is to try to understand the sources of high energy particles in general, as the highest energy charged particles are harder to point due to bending in magnetic fields. Measuring UHE protons from high red shifts is not possible due to the GZK mechanism, but that same mechanism will produce neutrinos that we are hoping to detect!