New Image Of 'Ghost Particles' Reveals Unique View Of Milky Way Galaxy

Scientists have managed to click an image of "ghost particles" that show the Milky Way galaxy in a way we haven't before. In a recent image of our fascinating home galaxy, scientists were able to capture neutrinos, otherwise known as "ghost particles."

These "ghost particles" are extremely difficult to detect from Earth. In fact, to pick up on these particles, scientists had to turn a block of Antarctic ice into a detector.

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Detecting ghost particles in the galaxy

The detector is called IceCube and is made up of thousands of sensors along massive cables that are drilled and frozen into a kilometre-long block of ice.

"This is the first time we're seeing our Galaxy using particles rather than photons [of light]," Professor Subir Sarkar from the University of Oxford told the BBC.

"The neutrino is a ghostly particle; it's basically almost without mass." Sarkar added that these particles move at the speed of light and might travel through the galaxy without interacting with anything. Owing to that, to spot these particles, one needs a massive detector.

IceCube Collaboration/National Science Foundation

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The bright areas in the image show areas where ghost particles are being emitted from. Scientists noted that these are different from visible light waves.

"What¡¯s intriguing is that, unlike the case for light of any wavelength, in neutrinos, the universe outshines the nearby sources in our own galaxy," said Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin¨CMadison and principal investigator at IceCube.

Denise Caldwell, director of the Physics Division at The National Science Foundation, added the following - "As is so often the case, significant breakthroughs in science are enabled by advances in technology. The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy, one that had only been hinted at before."

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Also read: New Milky Way Survey Reveals 3.3 Billion Cosmic Objects In Our Home Galaxy

Scientists believe that as such capabilities are refined, higher resolution images could help us see the galaxy unlike ever before. Findings from the study have been published in the journal Science.

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