A neutrino from space recently plunged into the Mediterranean Sea with an energy that blows all other known neutrinos out of the water.
Packing a punch of some 220 million billion electron volts, this particle was around 20 times as energetic as the highest energy cosmic neutrinos seen before, researchers report in the Feb. 13 Nature. The particle was glimpsed by the partially built Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope, or KM3NeT.
“They hit the jackpot,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. “We have been taking data with a much bigger detector for 10 years. We’ve never