A Teeny Tiny Particle That Hit Antarctica Is Actually HUGE

So you want your mind to be boggled. Here goes.

A little background first. There are these really really tiny subatomic particles that are nearly massless called neutrinos. Scientists tell us that trillions of them pass right through us (and everything else) every second of every day. Scientists also tell us that their ability to actually detect a single neutrino passing through a human body over its entire lifetime is roughly 50-50. So these neutrinos are very very hard to detect – even though trillions are passing through your body every second!

With that background here’s where things get interesting.

Using an instrument buried in the ice in Antarctica, Scientists have detected a high-energy neutrino that they calculate was was produced by a ginormous black hole in a galaxy roughly 4 billion years ago. Yes 4 billion years ago in a galaxy far far away (the blazar galaxy to be exact), a supermassive black hole emitted a stream of energetic particles toward Earth. Scientists detected one of them that traveled undisturbed for that entire time – until it hit their sensor in Antarctica. This discovery is very exciting to astrophysicists and causing them to recalculate and rewrite important things that they know about the universe. See the complete article here: https://www.livescience.com/63043-neutrino-blazar.html