Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
In 2023, a huge underwater observatory detected an unusual phenomenon beneath the Mediterranean Sea, causing a stir in the international scientific community.
It is an extremely high energy particle that passed through the Earth leaving a bright and inexplicable signal.
The event, recorded by the KM3NeT telescope, has defied conventional explanations and is forcing physicists to reconsider some of their most fundamental theories about the universe.
The trail of this particle, which has been described as an "impossible muon," not only broke records for detected energy but also displayed behavior that raised the possibility that we may be facing a direct manifestation of dark matter.
A discovery of this magnitude would not only be revolutionary in the field of physics, but could also be the first tangible evidence of one of the greatest mysteries of the modern universe.
In the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, an underwater telescope called KM3NeT observes subatomic particles that pass through the Earth undetected by the naked eye.
Unlike traditional telescopes that look up at the sky, this detector is oriented toward the planet's interior, searching for particles passing through Earth from the other side of the world.
It was one of KM3NeT's sensors that captured this extremely intense light signal in 2023, associated with the passage of a particle with an estimated energy of 220 peta-electronvolts (PeV).
This is an amount of energy greater than any human particle accelerator can generate, including the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
This flash exceeded by 35 times the luminosity of any other similar event captured by the observatory. The researchers, initially excited, tried to classify it into the known, but soon realized that it did not fit any conventional particle.
They considered hypotheses that go beyond the standard model of particle physics: one of them proposes that the captured signal could have been caused by a dark matter particle, something never before directly observed.
Dark matter is one of the great enigmas of current physics. Although it cannot be seen or touched, its presence is inferred from the gravitational effects it exerts on visible matter in the universe. It is estimated to represent around 85% of the total mass of the cosmos, but until now, its exact composition has not been identified.
According to a theory proposed in a recent article published on arXiv, what KM3NeT detected was not a simple neutrino, but a dark matter particle that, upon colliding with the Earth's rocky interior, would have generated a brief transformation in its structure.
This alteration would have produced a heavier version of the particle, which quickly decayed into two almost perfectly aligned muons, generating a flash so intense that only KM3NeT could detect.
The celestial origin of this particle has also been the subject of debate. Based on trajectory analysis, scientists believe it originates from a region of space home to several blazars, which are galaxies with active nuclei and supermassive black holes in their center.
These objects emit jets of particles at speeds close to the speed of light, and some of these beams may have traveled billions of years to reach Earth. (Text and Photo: Cubasí)
