Rendezvous

There may be some more to write about this discovery later, as scientists learn some more about the results of data they collected in September. If their initial work bears out, then researchers could solve the mystery of the origin of cosmic rays, the name given to high-energy particles that bombard the earth but are stopped by our atmosphere.

Investigation and observation showed that a high-energy particle detected at the IceCube Neutrino Laboratory in Antarctica last year came from a distant galaxy called TXS 0506+056. It's actually a special kind of galaxy called a "blazar," which is a galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole that creates a jet of matter aimed at the Earth. The matter, which travels at nearly light speed, doesn't come from the black hole itself but from the process of the black hole "eating" matter that falls into it.

The thing that make me sit and think was this: TXS 0506+056 is four billion light years from Earth, which means that the neutrino began its journey when the Earth was still forming.

Four billion light years away. Take the distance light travels in a year: about 5.9 trillion miles. Now multiply that by four billion -- a number big enough that if you started counting seconds at your birth you would reach it about three months before your 127th birthday (for grins, how old would you be if you kept counting until you reached a trillion? Two and a half months shy of your 31,710th birthday). You get a mileage figure something like 2,360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

And now, four billion years later, a particle with a mass so small it hasn't been measured yet zipped into the earth and by random chance happened to not be one of the hundreds of trillions of neutrinos that pass through our planet's atoms every day but hit something. More than that, it hit something where we had instruments to see the results.

And then we figured out where it came from.

Whoa.