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What is a blazar? Its high-energy flares could unlock the foundations of the universe
Science Jul 12, 2018 5:03 PM EDT
By —
Amanda Grennell
When a galaxy gets pulled into the supermassive black hole at its center — yes, that happens — it can create a blazar — an intense beam of high-energy radiation.
There are thousands of blazars across the universe, but on Thursday, a team of physicists, working with a lab near the South Pole, said they’ve discovered that blazars can also double as particle accelerators.
They report, in two papers published in the journal Science, that blazars are a source of high-energy neutrinos — elementary particles of the universe that could help trace the origin of cosmic rays.
The universe is full of neutrinos, but we barely know that they are there. Trillions of these elusive particles pass through your body every second, stopped only by a head-on collision with other particles, like the nucleus of an atom. In 1998, researchers discovered that neutrinos have mass, upending what was thought about how these ghost particles and possibly breaking the Standard Model of physics.
More:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/what-is-a-blazar-its-high-energy-flares-could-unlock-the-foundations-of-the-universe