← Azimuth Daily
Capturing data…
Capturing data…
TUE, 3 NOV · 81 ITEMS
"IceCube detects ghost particles with 10 billion times the energy of solar neutrinos" — Science Daily (all) · Science & Medicine
is a particle detector buried in a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice at the South Pole, instrumented with thousands of optical sensors that catch the faint blue flashes produced when a neutrino occasionally collides with an ice nucleus. are nearly massless, electrically neutral particles that pass through matter almost untouched — hence '' — so a detector this large is needed to catch a handful of them. The claim is that some of the cosmic neutrinos IceCube has recorded carry energies around 10 billion times that of a typical neutrino produced in the Sun's fusion core, which puts them in the peta-electronvolt (PeV) range — the highest-energy particles ever observed, presumably accelerated in violent extragalactic sources such as blazars or tidal disruption events.
The '10 billion times' figure is an order-of-magnitude comparison that IceCube researchers themselves use when describing ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos versus solar ones ( sit at roughly MeV energies, so 10 billion times lands near 10 PeV, consistent with IceCube's most energetic recorded events). The item is aggregated secondary coverage with no primary paper cited, so the number should be read as a well-worn illustrative comparison rather than a fresh measurement; the underlying primary sources would be IceCube Collaboration papers and the observatory's own science documentation.
The underlying material dates from 1998 and is only now being newly re-reported/resurfacing; the current wave of articles carrying it is from November 2026, so this is not genuinely new.