Secret unveiled! Giant Black Holes can be scary, but they also make these smallest of objects

Scientists found the source of the most elusive particles in the universe - Neutrinos. It’s none other than giant black holes! Know the details here.

Black Holes are the extragalactic Neutrino Factories, a new study revealed. (AFP)

Not all Black Holes are of the same size but what is common among all these fearsome astronomical objects is that they have a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them. And yes, they swallow anything and everything that comes near them, even stars. No matter how much we know about these mysterious black holes, there is always something or another revelation about these giant astronomical objects which leave everyone surprised. The latest study led by Sara Buson of Julius-Maximilians University, Germany, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters revealed another astonishing fact that Blazars, the gas-guzzling black holes at the centre of galaxies, are capable of producing tiny particles known as neutrinos.

According to scientists, these Neutrinos are the most inaccessible particles in the universe, which are capable of travelling nearly unhampered across it. Sara Buson explained, “Astrophysical neutrinos are produced exclusively in processes involving cosmic ray acceleration." As neutrinos are neutral, they can avoid magnetic fields. That means these particles can even travel straight through Earth! Scientists have now been able to trace back the neutrinos' paths to find their source. Though, that is not easy as it may seem!

To know the initial source of these particles is tough indeed. So, only 10 or so neutrinos a year are detected by the massive IceCube neutrino observatory, which is buried 1.35 kilometres deep in the South Pole's transparent ice. These neutrinos are powerful enough to suggest that they originated from space. Lower-energy neutrinos produced by cosmic rays striking Earth's atmosphere can be mysterious enough but they are not connected to cosmic sources, Sky and Telescope mentioned.

The research revealed interesting results though. Among several possible candidate sources of neutrinos, one possibility is a Blazar. Which is a class of extragalactic sources powered by supermassive black holes. “In this work, we show that blazars are unambiguously associated with high-energy astrophysical neutrinos at an unprecedented level of confidence, i.e., a chance probability of 6 × 10−7,” research revealed.

It further mentioned that the statistical analysis provides observational evidence that these blazars are astrophysical factories of these ghost-like neutrinos.