Fabao Zhang

Cosmic neutrinos are ghost particles, passing freely through the Earth. The IceCube telescope in the ice of Antarctica once caught such a neutrino, and it matched an infrared flare. That flare turned out to be the moment a black hole tore a star apart in a distant galaxy.

A bonfire that no one sees, but everyone feels the warmth: that's how astronomers found a flare in a distant galaxy. Not by its light, but by the infrared radiation of heated dust. The galaxy SDSS J010320.39+140152.5 caught attention when its center suddenly blazed in the infrared, as if someone had thrown logs onto an invisible fire.