4 ms·

Why couldn't it be just a weirdly energetic neutrino originating from the neighborhood of some black hole?

physicsdude 1mo ago
At some level, it could be (and that would be an great discovery as well!). It's a question of probabilities: it's unlikely to be any of the things that we already know about, but that doesn't mean that it's something new. Unlikely things happen --- infrequently. As stressed in the article and elsewhere in comments, more data should elucidate what is going on. That's the difficulty of these kinds of searches: there is one event, and we can't make clear, confident statements about one event.
procflora 1mo ago
Based on my very amateurish skim of this and a related paper, maybe so? They simulated the neutrino background as solar and cosmic ray atmospheric sources, so any source with a different energy distribution is perhaps a possible explanation for the event, I think. But probably more likely is for this to have been a particularly energetic event in the tail of one of the known sources of neutron recoil detection they did model. More events needed!
hershkumar 1mo ago
I actually saw one of the authors present the data yesterday, one of the audience comments was indeed that this could be explained by an astrophysical neutrino striking the detector (all other neutrino sources have energy thresholds much lower than the detected data), but the data on astrophysical neutrinos is sparse (in part why detectors like IceCube exist), so I believe the argument is that the chances that an astrophysical neutrino would strike the detector is negligible.
- scotty79 1mo ago
  Thank you very much for this first hand info. One might argue that chances of theoretical particle existing and showing up are at least as negligible.
  - hershkumar 1mo ago
    I think the WIMP interaction process via the models they tested and the data on astrophysical neutrinos from other detectors gives at least several(?) orders of magnitude of separation in the rate at which each would strike the detector. Of course this would not fully rule out the possibility that it is a stray neutrino.

At some level, it could be (and that would be an great discovery as well!). It's a question of probabilities: it's unlikely to be any of the things that we already know about, but that doesn't mean that it's something new. Unlikely things happen --- infrequently. As stressed in the article and elsewhere in comments, more data should elucidate what is going on. That's the difficulty of these kinds of searches: there is one event, and we can't make clear, confident statements about one event.

procflora 1mo ago

Based on my very amateurish skim of this and a related paper, maybe so? They simulated the neutrino background as solar and cosmic ray atmospheric sources, so any source with a different energy distribution is perhaps a possible explanation for the event, I think. But probably more likely is for this to have been a particularly energetic event in the tail of one of the known sources of neutron recoil detection they did model. More events needed!

hershkumar 1mo ago

I actually saw one of the authors present the data yesterday, one of the audience comments was indeed that this could be explained by an astrophysical neutrino striking the detector (all other neutrino sources have energy thresholds much lower than the detected data), but the data on astrophysical neutrinos is sparse (in part why detectors like IceCube exist), so I believe the argument is that the chances that an astrophysical neutrino would strike the detector is negligible.

scotty79 1mo ago
Thank you very much for this first hand info. One might argue that chances of theoretical particle existing and showing up are at least as negligible.
- hershkumar 1mo ago
  I think the WIMP interaction process via the models they tested and the data on astrophysical neutrinos from other detectors gives at least several(?) orders of magnitude of separation in the rate at which each would strike the detector. Of course this would not fully rule out the possibility that it is a stray neutrino.