For more than a decade, floating cranes have been lowering a strange load of about 3000 meters under the Mediterranean Sea. The objects are seen from another world: large and bright spheres full of electronics. They are called, in fact, a machine detectors. Km3netDesigned to find one of the most mysterious fundamental particles.
The machine is still several years from the end, so Coyle Pascual I was very surprised when, in 2023, he saw a dramatic signal in his preliminary data. It was a neutrino, as expected, but one different from anything never seen before. “When I tried to see this event for the first time, my program crashed,” says Coyle, a physicist at the Marseille Particle Physics Center, France.
Km3net had detected a neutrino of the space that had approximately 35 times more energy than any view previously seen. It was thousands of times more energetic than anything created in our best particle accelerators. Neutrinos have always challenged easy understanding: they interact so weakly with another matter that their presence is normally almost imperceptible. That is behind the decision to place the project detectors at the bottom of the sea. But this seemed almost impossible.
Now the race is underway to solve what in the universe could have produced it. As astronomers analyze the details, it seems that there are two possibilities, which point to some of the deepest and most strange scopes of the cosmos. There is much at stake, since understanding the origins of this particle can help us understand the true nature of the neutrinos and reveal the …
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