DARK MATTER

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT ON February 13, 2023, the Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss (ARCA) array—part of the larger Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), located in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy—detected a high-energy particle unlike any other.

- Darren Orf

After crunching the numbers for two years, scientists earlier this year announced that this particle likely originated from a blazar and was the highest-energy neutrino ever detected, by a factor of 35. Even more impressive, the array documented this particle while it was only partially finished.

However, there was one strange attribute of this neutrino event, which was dubbed KM3-230213A—the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole has never recorded such an event and did not detect this high-energy event, either. Now, a new preprint study suggests that one way to resolve this conundrum is to consider if the ultraenergetic muon neutrino was actually produced by dark matter.