INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL PROMINENT RESEARCH

ⒸIceCube Collaboration

On December 21st, 2018, Science announced the 2018 Breakthrough of the Year. As one of the Breakthrough, the observation experiment for neutrino in South Pole was selected. Chiba University’s researchers were also involved in this international research project.

Prof. Yoshida who led the research team said, “The Chiba team has been responsible for development of the algorithm to identify high energy cosmic neutrino events real-timely, which turned out to be a key contribution to this remarkable achievement. Together with teams from Germany, we also have worked on numerical estimates on how (un)likely this neutrino detection can be coincident to a gamma-ray flare in any of the known gamma-ray emitters by chance, concluding that the neutrino-gamma-ray connections indeed pointed out a high energy neutrino source for the first time. On the other hand, we do know this is just a starting point. An exciting journey has just begun to understand how on earth these galaxies are producing such high energy neutrinos.”

The international team consists of researchers from 12 countries around the world, in which Chiba team is mainly handling the development and operation of the above system connecting IceCube Neutrino Observatory and all researchers for this project.

The neutrino was detected at IceCube in the early morning on September 23rd, 2017. Immediately after Prof. Yoshida’s cell phone received the alert, he contacted some research teams having observation equipment. The observations were begun with more than ten telescopes from Japan, and the Hiroshima University’s team discovered a celestial body was shining through “Kanata Telescope.” As a result, the right part of constellation Orion, known as Blazar TXS 0506+056 was pinpointed as the neutrino source; this research was published in Science in July 2018.

For more information, please visit the following websites:

• Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A. Icecube Collaboration, Fermi-LAT, MAGIC, ASAS-SN, Kanata, Kiso, et.al. in Science , 12 Jul. 2018
  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6398/eaat1378
• 2018 Breakthrough of the Year（Text）
  http://vis.sciencemag.org/breakthrough2018/finalists/#neutrinos
• 2018 Breakthrough of the Year（Video）
  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/video-2018-s-breakthrough-year-and-runners
• International Center for Hadron Astrophysics
  http://www.icehap.chiba-u.jp/en/
• Institute for Global Prominent Research
  http://igpr.chiba-u.jp/global/research/division/page_03.html