A Mysterious 'Ghost Particle' Probably Didn't Come From a Black Hole's Meal After All - ScienceAlert

A high-energy neutrino traced back to a violent encounter between a black hole and a star needs a different origin story, new research has found.

An analysis of radio waves emitted by the encounter, known as AT2019dsg, has shown that it was fairly ordinary, at least as far as a black hole tearing apart a star goes.

The death of a star by a black hole isn't a neat and tidy process.

Nearly six months later, on 1 October 2019, a neutrino called IC191001A was detected at the IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica, clocking in at a whopping energy level of over 200 teraelectronvolts.

Based on characteristics such as how the light propagates, and how bright it is, scientists can work out the energy level of the neutrino, and the direction from whence it came.

IC191001A came from the direction of AT2019dsg, so closely that scientists calculated just a 0.2 percent chance that the neutrino and TDE were unrelated.

In order to produce a neutrino as energetic as IC191001A, the energy of the outflow would need to have been around 1,000 times greater.