High-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane

Posted on by Staff

For the first time, an international team of scientists presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from the Milky Way. The results were published on June 30, 2023 in Science (link).

See the press release here.

Artist's conception of the Milky Way
An artist’s composition of the Milky Way seen through a neutrino lens (blue)
The galaxy in neutrinos (blue sky map) in front of an artist's impression of the Milky Way.
An overlay of neutrinos over the Milky Way galaxy
Five panels showing the Milky Way in different wavelengths
Best-fit pre-trial significance as a function of direction, in equatorial coordinates for the all-sky scan (Figure 4 from the Science paper). The galactic plane is indicated by a grey curve, and the Galactic Center as a dot.
Energy scaled, sky-integrated, per-flavor neutrino flux vs energy for each of the galactic plane models (Figure 5 from the Science paper) and corresponding best-fit values in the region of the central 90% energy range that contribute to the observed significance for each model.
An artist's impression of neutrinos shooting down from the Milky Way onto the IceCube Lab at the South Pole at night
A history of neutrino astronomy from Antarctica
A timeline of neutrino astronomy
Francis Halzen
Naoko Kurahashi Neilson
Steve Sclafani
Mirco Hünnefeld
Wolfgang Rhode
Ignacio Taboada
Starry sky above the IceCube Lab at the South Pole, with a winterover on the rooftop shining headlamp light into the sky.
The IceCube Lab is seen with a starry, night sky and Milky Way in the backdrop over the northern lights
IceCube detector schematic
A neutrino detected in IceCube
A DOM being lowered
Group of winterovers posing around the post at the ceremonial South Pole.
The IceCube Collaboration in Madison, WI, USA (2022)