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Blazars and Ghost Particles: What's In A Name?

NASA / go.nasa.gov/2uqb0ga

In September of last year, an observatory at the South Pole detected a tiny streak of blue light deep within the ice below. That observatory is known as Ice Cube. Yes, like the rapper. It’s a coincidence that Dawn Williams of the Ice Cube Collaboration says sometimes confuses people on the internet.

“It turns out that some of the people who come to our page got there by mistake and bounce away,” Williams said.

But, in all seriousness, Ice Cube – the observatory – is now credited with a major breakthrough in astrophysics – detecting ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos, produced by something else called a blazar. Astrophysicists are excited at the prospect that this could help unravel the mystery about cosmic rays.

Meanwhile, here at Living Lab Radio, we’ve been wondering: What’s up with the names? 

“They have these really funny names, and a lot of them are descriptive. For instance, the gluon, it holds the nucleus together. It’s like glue. Others are named after people. They each have their own little history and they’re all different,” Greg Kestin said.

Kestin holds a faculty position at Harvard University, he contributes to the PBS Nature of Reality blog, and he hosts the YouTube series What the Physics. He helped explain the names for us. 

Ghost particles, for instance, are named that because they go through almost everything. 

"A ghost usually is an ethereal thing that can pass right through you. Maybe you think that is possesses you, but nutrinos can’t possess you, but there are trillions of them going through you every second," Kestin said. 

Then there's the Ice Cube Observatory. It has a descriptive name. 

"“First imagine that you have a neutrino – it’s a ghostly particle that’s flying through the air, and it doesn’t hit things very often, but every once in a while it will hit a nucleolus of an atom," Kestin said. "The collision will cause an electron or a muon, or something that’s less ghostly to pop out.  If those thing pop out from a cosmic neutrino that’s moving really fast, then that electron will be moving so fast that it’ll actually start emitting light as it starts traveling through ice, so that light is what’s detected.”

So Ice Cube is light detectors, thousands of light detectors buried beneath the antartic ice, detecting those little bits of blue light that come off when nuetrinos happen to hit one of those atoms.

Blazars were also something we were perplexed by. 

"“It’s a quasar that’s blazing,” Kestin said.

The quasar is the center of a galaxy, he explained, and at the center of every galaxy is a super massive black hole. Black holes are so big that their gravity pulls lots of things in – stars and gas – and if it eats really fast it spits out some of that matter. It can spit it out in a really energetic blaze.

So, it’s the center of the galaxy that’s shooting particles towards us. 

Blazars, ghost particles, gluons, and Ice Cube Observatory: consider us educated. 

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Elsa Partan is a producer and newscaster with CAI. She first came to the station in 2002 as an intern and fell in love with radio. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 2006 to 2009, she covered the state of Wyoming for the NPR member station Wyoming Public Media in Laramie. She was a newspaper reporter at The Mashpee Enterprise from 2010 to 2013. She lives in Falmouth with her husband and two daughters.