Neutrino hunt finds no signals from colliding neutron stars
An international team searched for ghostly neutrinos from colliding neutron stars using the world's most sensitive detector and found nothing—a null result that reshapes expectations for multimessenger astronomy. The finding suggests either these cosmic collisions emit far fewer high-energy neutrinos than theorists predicted, or detection requires radically more sensitive instruments to develop next-generation gravitational wave science.
Originaltitel: Probing neutrino emission at GeV energies from compact binary mergers with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
<p>The advent of multimessenger astronomy has allowed for new types of source searches by neutrino detectors. We present the results of the search for 0.5–100 GeV astrophysical neutrinos detected with IceCube and emitted from compact binary mergers detected by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA interferometers from their first run of observation (O1) to the end of the first part of the fourth (O4a). An innovative approach is used to lower the energy threshold to 0.5 GeV and to search for an excess of GeV neutrinos in time coincidence with astrophysical transient events. Furthermore, we use a statistical combination of all observations, a binomial test, to search for a subpopulation of neutrino emitters. No significant excess was found from the studied mergers, with a best post-trial 𝑝-value of 40%, and there is currently no hint of a population of GeV neutrino emitters found in the IceCube data (post-trial 𝑝−value=81%).</p>