Physics Buzz

The long winter nights are upon us — what better way to pass the evening than by doing your bit for science? Best part is, you can still watch that favorite holiday movie. Last week we featured a podcast all about the power of citizen scientists helping to analyze very large datasets. This week, I want to highlight one such citizen science project that just celebrated its one year anniversary ! This project is known as Radio Galaxy Zoo , a title that you might recognize from the very successful Galaxy Zoo .

There is no disputing the fact that radio galaxies are the most extreme objects in the universe. 1 Radio galaxies are recognizable by their enormous jets and lobes of radiating plasma, driven outwards at nearly the speed of light by supermassive black holes harbored in galaxy cores. Pretty amazing right? But I wouldn't want to get anywhere near one. Cygnus A, the classic view of a radio galaxy, showing the tiny central host galaxy and the enormous jets and lobes which punch through the gas environment at nearly the speed of light. Credit: NRAO/AUI

This week on The Physics Central Podcast I'm talking about Bert, Ernie, Big Bird and Mr. Snuffaluffagus. No, not the muppets: the neutrinos! In the November 22 issue of the journal Science , the IceCube neutrino experiment announced its detection of 28 very special neutrinos, which the collaboration members then named after characters from Sesame Street (apparently it's easier to remember names than numbers).  There are a lot of neutrinos in the world, but these 28 mean something very special to the astrophysics community. These are the highest energy neutrinos ever detected, and they may be associated with some of the most violent and awesome events in our universe, such as active galactic nuclei (a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at the center), gamma ray bursts (the most instantaneously luminous events in the universe), a pulsar (a super-dense, super-magnetized rotating star), or perhaps some as-yet-unknown phenomenon. Listen to this week's podcast to learn