The recent discovery of neutrino particles bombarding Earth from outer space has ushered in a new era in neutrino astronomy, scientists say.

Neutrinos are produced when cosmic rays interact with their surroundings, yielding particles with no electrical charge and negligible mass. Scientists have wondered about the source of cosmic rays since they were discovered, and finding cosmic neutrinos could provide clues about the origin of the mysterious rays.

In November, a team of scientists announced the discovery of cosmic neutrinos by the giant IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. [Neutrinos from Beyond the Solar System Found (Images)]

"We now have the opportunity to determine what the sources are, if we are indeed seeing sources of cosmic rays," said Francis Halzen, principal investigator of the IceCube observatory and a theoretical physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The big difference why it's new astronomy is that we are not using light, we are using neutrinos to look at the sky."

Cosmic visitors

Neutrinos are the social misfits of the particle world they rarely interact with matter. Produced in some of the most violent, but unknown, events in the universe, they travel to Earth at close to the speed of light and in straight lines, which reveals information about their origin. Supernovas, active galactic nuclei and black holes are some of the possible sources for these ghostly particles.

Until recently, scientists had only detected neutrinos beyond Earth from the sun or from a supernova in the Milky Way in 1987. No neutrinos from distant cosmic sources had been seen.

But in April 2012, IceCube recorded two neutrinos with extremely high energies almost a billion times that of the ones found in 1987 that could only have come from a high-energy source outside the solar system. After looking deeper into the data, scientists found a total of 28 high-energy neutrinos with energies greater than 30 teraelectronvolts (TeV), reporting their finding in the journal Science.

The finding opens the door to a new kind of astronomy that would "image" the sky in the light of neutrinos, rather than photons. "Each time we find another way to make a picture of the sky using gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves you have always been able to see things you never saw before," Halzen told SPACE.com.

The successful completion of IceCube and the prospect of other telescopes on the horizon have set the neutrino world abuzz.

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Neutrino Telescopes Launch New Era of Astronomy