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The IceCube, FermiLAT and MAGIC collaborations have announced coincident detections of very high energy gamma-rays and neutrinos coming from a particular type of astrophysical object known as a blazar, an activate galactic nucleus which ejects matter in a thin beam, known as a jet, towards the Earth.

The detection by IceCube of a high-energy neutrino arriving from a direction that coincides with a known blazar solves an outstanding problem in astronomy that has puzzled scientists for nearly a century; namely, what is the origin of cosmic rays and ultra high-energy neutrinos. This observations also demarcates an important step in astronomy, as this is the second major discovery achieved by exploiting the benefits of multi-messenger observations (i.e. simultaneous detections by two experiments searching for different signatures of a singular event), with the first being the observation of merging neutron stars that occurred just last year.

Please see attached document. Text by Sam Witte and Nuno Agostinho.