Supermassive black holes may provide the key to understanding some of the most energetic particles in the universe.

A new model suggests that ultra-high-energy cosmic rays accelerated by the jets of enormous black holes may give birth to high-energy neutrinos and high-energy gamma-rays. The model is the first of its kind based on detailed numerical computations and matches up with observations of each particle.

"The new model suggests that very high-energy neutrinos and high-energy gamma rays are naturally produced via particle collisions as daughter particles of cosmic rays, and thus can inherit the comparable energy budget of their parent particles," Kohta Murase, an assistant professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said in a statement. Intrigued by the similar power in each of the three particles, Murase and his colleague Ke Fang, a postdoctoral associate in astronomy at the University of Maryland, investigated the particles' origins and found the black-hole connection.