On February 12, 2025, The KM3NeT Collaboration has announced the detection from the abyss of the Mediterranean Sea of a cosmic neutrino with a record-breaking energy of about 220 PeV.
More information can be found in the:
- Nature publication: “Observation of an ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrino with KM3NeT”
- Press release
- Popular information
This breakthrough was achieved through international collaboration. KM3NeT consists of over 360 scientists and engineers from 68 institutions in 21 countries. Among them, Polish researchers, including scientists from AstroCeNT (CAMK PAN), play a vital role in the project, contributing to data analysis, detector calibration, and technology development.
“This exciting discovery, made with only a fraction of the full KM3NeT/ARCA telescope, demonstrates the ultra-high energy astronomy potential of KM3NeT. Observing such a multi-PeV event is both a challenge for our current understanding of the most extreme particle acceleration mechanisms and the first step towards a better understanding of the environments in which they occur”, says Piotr Kalaczyński, a researcher at NCAC PAS and AGH.
As KM3NeT continues to expand, future observations will help identify the sources of these extreme neutrinos, advancing our understanding of cosmic accelerators and the high-energy Universe. This detection marks a significant step toward a new era in multi-messenger astronomy.
