Technologies

Why the Ghost Particles Crashing Into Antarctica Could Change Astronomy Forever

About 1.2 miles beneath Antarctica, an underground observatory is hunting for «ghost particles.» What it finds could reveal the unseen heart of a distant galaxy.

About 47 million light-years from where you’re sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 spits out streams of enigmatic particles. They’re neutrinos — otherwise known as the elusive «ghost particles» haunting our universe while leaving little trace of their existence.

Immediately after coming into being, bundles of these invisible bits plunge across the cosmic expanse. They whisk by bright stars we can see and zip past pockets of space teeming with marvels we’re yet to discover. They fly and fly and fly until, occasionally, they reach Earth’s South Pole and drill themselves underground. The neutrinos’ journey is seamless.

But scientists patiently wait for them to arrive.

Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. And when any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube remains vigilant.

In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 «high-energy neutrino emissions» coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. «Neutrino astronomy,» scientists call it.

It’d be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.

Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet’s atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube’s first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056.

With this newfound neutrino source, we’re entering a new era of the particle’s story. In fact, according to the research team, it’s likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can’t tell.

And if you wanted to stop a neutrino in its tracks, you’d need to fight it with a block of lead one light-year-wide — though even then, there’d be a fractional chance of success. Thus, harnessing these particles, NCG 1068’s version or not, could allow us to penetrate areas of the cosmos that’d usually lie out of reach.

Now what?

Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn’t even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe’s backstage.

They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we’re unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.

«The universe has multiple ways of communicating with us,» Denise Caldwell of the National Science Foundation and a member of the IceCube team, told reporters on Thursday. «Electromagnetic radiation, which we see as light from stars, gravitational waves that shake the fabric of space — and elementary particles, such as protons, neutrons and electrons spewed out by localized sources.

«One of these elementary particles has been neutrinos that permeate the universe, but unfortunately, neutrinos are very difficult to detect.»

In fact, even the galaxy NGC 1068 and its gargantuan black hole are typically obscured by a thick veil of dust and gas, making them hard to parse with standard optical telescopes and equipment — despite years of scientists trying to pierce its curtain. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope could have a leg up in this case due to its infrared eyes, but neutrinos may be an even better way in.

Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.

«We are very lucky, in a sense, because we can access an amazing understanding of this object,» Elisa Resconi, of the Technical University of Munich and IceCube team member, said of NGC 1068.

It’s also notable that there are many (many) more galaxies similar to NGC 1068 — categorized as Seyfert galaxies — than there are blazars similar to TXS 0506+056. This means IceCube’s latest discovery is, arguably, a larger step forward for neutrino astronomers than the observatory’s seminal one.

Perhaps the bulk of neutrinos diffusing throughout the universe are rooted in NGC 1068 doppelgangers. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s far more to the merit of neutrinos than just their sources.

These ghosts, as Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an IceCube team member put it, are fit to solve two major mysteries in astronomy.

First off, a wealth of galaxies in our universe boast gravitationally monstrous voids at their centers, black holes reaching masses millions to billions of times greater than our sun’s. And these black holes, when active, blast jets of light from their guts — emitting enough illumination to outshine every single star in the galaxy itself. «We don’t understand how that happens,» Vandenbrouke said simply. Neutrinos could provide a way to study the regions around black holes.

Second is the general, yet persistent, conundrum of cosmic rays.

We don’t really know where cosmic rays come from either, but these strings of particles reach energies to and beyond millions of times higher than we can reach here on Earth with human-constructed particle accelerators like the one at CERN.

«We think neutrinos have some role to play,» Vandenbroucke said. «Something that can help us answer these two mysteries of black holes powering very bright galaxies and of the origins of cosmic rays.»

A decade to catch a handful

To be clear, IceCube doesn’t exactly trap neutrinos.

Basically, this observatory tells us every time a neutrino happens to interact with the ice shrouding it. «Neutrinos hardly interact with matter,» Vandenbrouke emphasized. «But they do interact sometimes.»

As millions of neutrinos shoot into the icy region where IceCube is set up, at least one tends to bump into a speck of ice, which then shatters and produces a flash of light. IceCube sensors capture that flash and send the signal up to the surface, notifications that are then analyzed by hundreds of scientists.

Ten years of light-flash-data allowed the team to pretty much map out where every neutrino seems to be coming from in the sky. It soon became clear there was a dense region of neutrino emissions located right where galaxy NGC 1068 is stationed.

But even with such evidence, Resconi said the team knew «it’s not the time to open the champagne, because we still have one fundamental question to answer. How many times did this alignment happen just by chance? How can we be sure neutrinos are actually coming from such an object?»

So, to make matters as concrete as possible, and really, truly prove this galaxy is spitting out ghosts, «we generated 500 million times the same experiment,» Resconi said.

Upon which, I can only imagine, a bottle of Veuve was popped at last. Though the hunt isn’t over.

«We are only beginning to scratch the surface as far as finding new sources of neutrinos,» Ignacio Taboada of the Georgia Institute of Technology and IceCube team member said. «There must be many other sources far deeper than NGC 1068, hiding somewhere to be found.»

Technologies

I Used to Tell People Wi-Fi 7 Routers Were a Waste of Money. CNET’s Lab Data Just Proved Me Wrong

Technologies

My Camera Test: Comparing the $499 Pixel 10A With the Galaxy S25 FE, Motorola Edge

The Pixel 10A’s cameras are similar to those on the 9A, but it still performs quite well compared to other phones in its price range.

Google’s $499 Pixel 10A uses nearly the same cameras as last year’s Pixel 9A, but I wanted to see how its photos directly match up to its midrange Android rivals: the $650 Samsung Galaxy S25 FE and the $550 Motorola Edge.

I traveled with all three phones around St. Petersburg, Florida, checking how flexible each was in different environments, from bright outdoor settings to an indoor coffee shop and an evening brewery. All three environments can be challenging for the small image sensors on each phone.

While I find the cameras on all three phones to have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the setting, I’m quite impressed with how the Pixel 10A keeps up. In my tests, the photos include lots of detail, even though certain settings appear to involve a lot of processing to improve them.

Wide and telephoto cameras

Starting with photos taken on the sidewalk in downtown St. Petersburg, I notice that all three phones handle bright sunlight slightly differently, especially how it’s depicted on the street.

For the Pixel 10A, the sun provides a slight exposure mark over the Bay First sign at the top of the frame, but it remains fairly cordoned off to focus on the rest of the streetscape. Zooming in, you can see the Century 21 location, but the street is captured in the most detail, with the phone’s camera maintaining its natural gray color.

For both the Galaxy S25 FE and the Motorola Edge, the sun has a more pronounced effect on the rest of the image. The pavement’s color is notably brighter. I also find both the S25 FE and the Edge have slightly more clarity on the business signs on the Bay First building, including the aforementioned Century 21 logo.

Since the S25 FE and the Edge each include a telephoto camera that supports 3x optical zoom, I took a photo at that zoom with each phone. The Pixel 10A uses digital zoom on the phone’s 48-megapixel wide camera, but a lot of the scene’s detail remains preserved.

The Pixel’s zoom photo provides a clear view of the 7th St N sign, the trees and the plants. However, if you look further back at the next intersection, you’ll notice that the 7th St S sign and the Colony Grill are much harder to see. It’s those smaller details that are captured by the S25 FE and the Edge, both aided by telephoto cameras, making them more visible.

Of the three zoom photo examples, I feel like the S25 FE has the best color reproduction while also retaining details like the signs further back. Even though the photo was taken with the S25 FE’s 8-megapixel telephoto camera rather than its 50-megapixel wide camera, the colors remain complementary when comparing the 1x to the 3x. Meanwhile, the Edge’s 10-megapixel telephoto camera looks quite a bit different from the 50-megapixel wide camera — the whole image has a more yellowish hue.

Ultrawide cameras

Moving inside the Southern Grounds coffee shop, I decided to use the ultrawide cameras to capture my sausage, egg and cheese on toast. The three photos came out wildly different.

The Pixel 10A’s 13-megapixel ultrawide and S25 FE’s 12-megapixel ultrawide have a more balanced set of colors and details, in my opinion. The wheat toast appears lighter in the Pixel’s photo than in the darker hues captured by both the S25 FE and the Edge.

When zooming into my notebook, however, the Pixel and S25 FE captured more of the page markings, details that blur together more in the photo taken by the Edge. While the Edge’s 50-megapixel ultrawide camera is a higher-spec number, I noticed it had a harder time distinguishing toast levels, giving more of it a darker look. If I hadn’t eaten it myself, I’d have thought it was burned based on the Edge’s photo.

Night photography

Moving over to a nighttime setting, I used the three phones to take photos outside of 3 Daughters Brewing. I felt like all three did a decent job at producing the colors of the building, but they differ in how they handle light sources.

Both the Pixel and the S25 FE tone back the glare produced by the various lighting fixtures. Meanwhile, the Edge’s photos show noticeable streaks that dominate the sky. When inspecting the photos more closely, I find that the Galaxy captured a sharper view of the furniture, like in the Connect 4 set next to the blue chairs in the center of the frame. The same details are visible in the Pixel’s and the Edge’s depictions of the scene, but they appear smudgy by comparison.

This type of scene needs to take advantage of a phone’s processing power in order to iron out visibility issues, and I do find that the Edge appears to come up short here in this regard, with a lot of noticeable image noise.

Selfies

Each phone takes selfies with noticeable differences in style and color choices. For this test example, I’m in a well-lit daytime room with natural light from a window. The 12-megapixel front-facing camera on Google’s Pixel 10A brightened up my face as if there was a light in front of me, and captured a decent amount of the details of my hair and face.

The front-facing camera on Samsung’s Galaxy S25 FE shows a noticeably darker color tone, but it still captures a similar shade of orange on the wall behind me. Of the three photos, I felt like the S25 captures the most details, including strands of hair, and defaulted to a closer crop than the other two.

The photos taken by the 50-megapixel selfie camera on the Motorola Edge feel a bit smoothed out. The orange color on the wall is noticeably different from the Pixel and the S25 FE, though it does capture a lot of my face details, from hair strands to the fabric textures on my shirt.

The $499 Pixel 10A camera keeps up and, in some cases, exceeds the detail captured by the slightly more expensive $550 Motorola Edge and $650 Galaxy S25 FE. I’m quite impressed by how the Pixel camera handles colors and low-light environments, but the phone’s processing work sometimes makes scenes appear brighter than they are in real life.

The Galaxy S25 FE is no slouch either, with a third telephoto lens for capturing more detail farther away. While I did find the Motorola Edge to struggle in low light, it is one of the lowest-cost phone options currently available for someone who must have a 3x optical telephoto camera.

But if you can live without the telephoto lens, the Pixel 10A’s low cost and photography abilities will likely be a good fit for most people.

Google’s Pixel 10A Looks Stylish for a Low-Cost Flagship Phone

+15 More

See all photos

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for March 14 #741

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 14, No. 741.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Does today’s date seem memorable to you? If so, today’s NYT Strands puzzle might be easy. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: A math teacher’s favorite dessert.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: 3.14

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

RITE, SPIT, TIPS, STAT, STATE, GIVE, RUST, FINE, LAZE, SURE, PEAL

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

VENT, CRUST, FRUIT, EDGES, GLAZE, FILLING, LATTICE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is HAPPYPIDAY. To find it, start with the H that’s six rows down and three to the right from the upper-left corner, and make — well, a pie shape.