{"id":86107,"date":"2018-12-26T01:02:23","date_gmt":"2018-12-26T09:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/runners-up"},"modified":"2018-12-26T01:02:23","modified_gmt":"2018-12-26T09:02:23","slug":"runners-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/runners-up","title":{"rendered":"Runners-up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/runners-up.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>New kinds of messengers from the distant universe are joining the photons collected by telescopes\u2014and revealing what light can\u2019t show. So-called multimessenger astrophysics got started with high-speed particles called cosmic rays and gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time first detected in 2015 that <em><i>Science<\/i><\/em> named Breakthrough of the Year in 2016. This year, another messenger has joined the party: neutrinos, tiny, almost massless particles that are extraordinarily hard to detect.<\/p>\n<p>Snaring one of these extra-galactic will-o\u2019-the-wisps took a cubic kilometer of ice deep below the South Pole, festooned with light detectors to record the faint flash triggered\u2014very rarely\u2014by a neutrino. Known as IceCube, the massive detector has logged many neutrinos before, some from outside the Milky Way, but none had been pinned to a particular cosmic source. Then, on 22 September 2017, a neutrino collided with a nucleus in the ice, and the light sensors got a good fix on the direction it had come from.<\/p>\n<p>An alert sent out to other telescopes produced, after a few days, a match. As the researchers reported in July, NASA\u2019s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope found an intensely bright source known as a blazar right where the neutrino appeared to come from. A blazar is the heart of a galaxy centered on a supermassive black hole, whose gravity heats up gas swirling around it, causing the material to glow brightly and fire jets of particles out of the maelstrom.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/362\/6421\/1346\">http:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/362\/6421\/1346<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New kinds of messengers from the distant universe are joining the photons collected by telescopes\u2014and revealing what light can\u2019t show. So-called multimessenger astrophysics got started with high-speed particles called cosmic rays and gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time first detected in 2015 that Science named Breakthrough of the Year in 2016. This year, another messenger [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}