Neutrinos are some of the weirdest and most mysterious particles in the universe, but we are starting to learn more about their origins. For the first time, a team of researchers has traced a single high-energy neutrino back to its birthplace, a supermassive black hole around 4 billion light years away.

On 22 September last year, a blue light pulsed through the ice deep under the South Pole. This light was generated by a high-energy neutrino passing through Earth and picked up by an experiment called the IceCube detector that traced the …