Reacción a "Highest-energy cosmic neutrino detected to date"

KM3NeT [a European underwater research infrastructure] has succeeded in detecting a very high-energy event, called KM3-230213A, associated with cosmic neutrinos.  

The KM3NeT underwater telescope is located deep in the Mediterranean and consists of two modes: the ARCA detector, near Sicily (Italy), mainly focused on neutrino astronomy and the ORCA detector, near the French Mediterranean coast, optimized for the study of atmospheric neutrino oscillations. Both detectors have not yet been completed but are now operational. Once completed, the KM3NET telescope will reach proportions on the order of a cubic kilometer.  

When a high-energy neutrino interacts in the vicinity of the detector, it creates charged particles that emit luminous radiation.   

Even with its detectors still under construction, KM3NeT/ARCA has managed to observe the signal from a muon (a charged particle, similar to the electron but heavier) of very high energy, on the order of ~120 PeV (peta-electronvolts). In view of its enormous energy and nearly horizontal direction, this signal seems to be associated with a neutrino of cosmic origin, with an estimated energy of ~220 PeV.   

With this result, the KM3NeT collaboration reports evidence of the observation of the highest energy cosmic neutrino detected to date. This is an extremely important result that confirms the absolutely relevant role of neutrino telescopes in multi-messenger astronomy. Previously, another telescope (IceCube, located at the South Pole) had announced the observation of PeV neutrinos, but (more than) 10 times less energetic than KM3-230213A. Note also the complementarity between the two experiments, KM3NeT and IceCube, each mostly sensitive to neutrinos coming from different directions of the sky.  

The KM3NeT study is of high quality and suggests that the neutrino may have originated from a cosmic accelerator different from those that originate the lowest energy cosmic neutrinos. Alternatively, this could be the first detection of a cosmogenic neutrino, i.e., resulting from interactions of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays with cosmic background photons in the universe. The most likely extragalactic neutrino sources for the KM3-230213A event should be active galactic nuclei and blazars (bright nuclei of active galaxies). Researchers have identified some blazar sources that could be compatible with the estimated direction from which the neutrino traveled; however, so far, none of them has been clearly identified as the astrophysical source of the neutrino.   

Other possible origins, for example, related to new physics, such as a very massive dark matter candidate, are also not ruled out.  

It is clear that this result is a major breakthrough in neutrino astronomy, as it provides evidence for the existence of ultra-high energy neutrinos in nature, at previously unexplored energies.  

On the other hand, it opens new questions about their origin. Further investigation and future observations will allow us to better understand the physical mechanisms that give rise to very high-energy neutrinos.