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July 12, 2018 outreach

NSF Press Conference on Neutrino-Blazar Discovery

NSF held a press conference on Thursday, July 12, 2018 to announce the major discovery of the first high-energy neutrino detected from a distant cosmological source. IceCube and AMON researchers at Penn State played a prominent role in this major advance. The result is reported in two articles in the current issue of Science and featured on its cover: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6398. This discovery marks the beginning of a new branch of astronomy using high-energy neutrinos and, since it partly relied on the coincident detection of high-energy photons, places in sharp relief the critical importance of the multimessenger approach pioneered at IGC through our AMON project. An article for lay audiences published in “The Conversation” by Doug Cowen, Derek Fox and Azadeh Keivani was picked up by CNN, CBS News, Smithsonian Magazine, Newsweek and EarthSky and attracted nearly 30,000 reads in the first four days!

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About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.