(they travel fast…really fast)

This isn’t often discussed but has big implications.  Apparently they discovered some very unusual particles in a place where you might not expect…way beneath the ice on one of our poles:

Buried deep in the Antarctic ice, an observatory has spotted ghostly, nearly massless particles coming from inside our galaxy and points beyond the Milky Way.

Finding these cosmic neutrinos not only confirms their existence but also sheds light on the origins of cosmic rays, the researchers said.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is made up of 86 shafts dug 8,000 feet into the ice near the South Pole. The shafts are equipped with detectors that look for the telltale light from high-energy particles plowing through the surrounding ice.

Here is a bit more background on the properties of neutrinos:

Neutrinos have little mass, and zip through matter so easily that a block of lead a light-year across wouldn’t stop them. These elusive particles come from high-energy sources: exploding stars, black holes and galactic cores among them.

Though they don’t interact much with matter, occasionally one will hit an atomic nucleus on Earth. When that happens the neutrino generates a particle called a muon. That’s what scientists look for when seeking neutrinos — the muons move faster than the speed of light in a solid (ice in this case) and generate light waves, like the wake of a boat in water, called Cherenkov radiation.

In general terms, this find indicates that we are being influenced by portions of the universe in ways we do not understand.  Usually we just think of seeing a star or galaxy through a telescope and assuming the visual light or radio waves we detect are where things stop.

And here is a cool related video about neutrinos.

thanks to space.com for the great info

In this video they also give a very quick and articulate background of sub atomic particles that spans 4 minutes.  Some astronomers think that “tachyons” and neutrinos will be used in the future of space travel.  What do you think?