This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Neutrinos are funny little particles that weigh almost nothing, making them one of the universe's most elusive building blocks. They can come from objects as mundane as bananas and as exotic as supernovas—the exploding death throes of massive stars.
Most neutrinos stream through space and pass through the Earth without interacting with anything. An experiment called IceCube, built to detect these "ghost particles" emitted from astrophysical events, just won a Nobel Prize. As a physicist, I'm interested in figuring out where the neutrinos IceCube detects come from.
A study that my colleagues and I published in October 2026 suggests that we could potentially use radio telescopes to answer this question. The study is published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics. Even though these telescopes can't see neutrinos, we can use their data to match up IceCube's detections with their potential sources out in space.
Knowing which types of objects produce neutrinos can tell astronomers about the physics occurring within those objects. Most particles interact with the universe through a fundamental force of nature called electromagnetism. It's the force that powers the phone, tablet or computer that you may be reading this article on.
It drives all the chemistry responsible for life, and it's responsible for the light your eyes can see. What makes neutrinos odd is that they don't interact with the universe through electromagnetism. Instead, they interact with the universe via a force that physicists call the weak interaction.
This force only acts over distances smaller than the inside of an atomic nucleus; as such, they must pass very, very close to the centers of atoms in order to interact—otherwise they just fly right through. That makes them very difficult to detect—but not impossible. Scientists have been able to detect neutrinos from space—called astrophysical neutrinos—since the 1960s.
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