Like something that could be read straight from a plotline of a sci-fi movie, science news last week was dominated with the reports of highly-energetic deep-space neutrinos discovered the the South Pole observatory. Neutrinos are some of the most fascinating and elusive subatomic particles. Their name means “small neutral ones,” and they are extremely hard to detect. Yet untold billions of them pass through the Earth and every part of your body every second.

Neutrinos are a regular byproduct of nuclear reactions, and they had been crucial in shedding light on the processes that go deep inside our Sun. Because they hardly ever interact with the rest of the matter, once a neutrino is created deep inside the Sun it can zip all the way to the Earth without encountering any obstacles.

The neutrinos that have been observed recently at the South Pole include neutrinos that originated far beyond our Solar System, and perhaps far beyond our Galaxy. They are extremely energetic particles that have probably been created in some of the most dramatic and violent cosmological events – supernovae explosions, swallowing of enormous amounts of matter by supermassive black holes, etc. Many such events are hard to observe in the visible light. This is why the discovery of these super energetic neutrinos is such an important event. It shows the potential and viability of “neutrino astronomy” – observation of the universe in terms of detecting neutrinos. Such observations can lead to a lot of new insights about the nature and evolution of galaxies, as well as the origin of the universe itself in the Big Bang.