A high energy neutrino: Reading a Message Carried on a Distant Tide

Recommendable! Amazing stuff! Reality is stranger than science fiction! 😄

"Some 700 million years ago, as it was being ripped to pieces by a black hole, a distant star sent out “messages” in the form of subatomic particles – neutrinos. In 2019, one of those neutrinos slammed into a detector at the South Pole with unprecedented force. In only the second instance in which researchers were able to trace a high-energy neutrino back to its cosmic source, international research teams working with telescopes on the ground and in space, an array of detectors and theoretical models found that this tiny, ageless particle had a story to tell. ...
This particular research focused on so-called tidal disruption events (TDEs), which occur when stars venture too close to the supermassive black holes at the centers of their galaxies. These dramatic events were first observed around a decade ago ... the first to study this class of cosmic events – yet they are still not well understood. The gravitational force acting on a doomed star – in this case from a black hole with a mass of 30 million suns – creates a tidal effect. That is, its pull is stronger on the near side than on the far one. ..."

"... The IceCube Collaboration [south pole neutrino observatory] recently reported the likely association of one high-energy neutrino with a flare from the relativistic jet of an active galaxy pointed towards the Earth. ..."

Reading a Message Carried on a Distant Tide A high-energy neutrino that flung out from a star, ripped apart by a black hole, reveals something about the cosmic sources of these mysterious particles

Here is the link to the underlying research article:

A tidal disruption event coincident with a high-energy neutrino (no public access)