High-Energy Neutrinos from the Milky Way

                                                                  SUMMER COLLOQUIUM

Our host galaxy, the Milky Way, is visible to the eye as a faint band of light in the night sky. This emission from the Galactic plane covers a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma rays. A fraction of the gamma-ray emission is theorized to arise from cosmic rays interacting with the interstellar medium. The presence of this diffuse gamma-ray emission implies the existence of Galactic neutrinos produced by the same processes. Recently, high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane were observed by IceCube, a neutrino detector instrumenting a cubic kilometer of glacial ice at the South Pole. This observation, enabled by novel tools based on deep learning, thus opens a new window to study the universe, marking the beginning of Galactic neutrino astronomy.