In a major breakthrough, ancient blazar found at end of cosmic rays mystery

A blazar is defined by the laser-like beam of high-energy radiation that it sometimes shoots out along its poles, travelling at near lightspeed towards Earth

I. Prologue

Before Earth was born, a supermassive black hole far, far away shot a catastrophic jet of radiation into space. It was so powerful that one piece of that radiation was able to travel for 4.6 billion years through the universe and reach Earth, where it terminated in a quiet ping inside a detector buried under Earth’s south pole last September. Just like that, a potentially major finding was on humanity’s cards.

Meanwhile on Earth, scientists working at the same detector, called IceCube, reported a curious finding in 2013. They had identified 28 high-energy variants of particles called neutrinos