Dark Matter May Gravitationally Lens Cosmic Neutrino Source, Offering New Insights
Astronomers, led by Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, have observed that the jet of a distant blazar, PKS 2233-148, appears to have been gravitationally lensed by an unseen source of dark matter. This phenomenon, where a mass bends the path of light from a distant source, caused a sudden displacement in the blazar's jet and a fast gamma-ray flash. PKS 2233-148 is considered a likely source of cosmic neutrinos, which are chargeless, almost massless particles produced alongside electromagnetic waves in blazar jets. The team utilized high-resolution observations across the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio data from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) in the U.S., gamma-ray observations from the Fermi-LAT space telescope, and X-ray detections from the Swift-XRT observatory, to precisely determine the jet's motion and variations. This marks the fourth instance of a likely cosmic neutrino source being gravitationally lensed, and the first time such an event might ... 
