![]() ![]() ![]() For great results, scientists have built their neutrino detectors under meters of ice in Antarctica and, soon, at the bottom of the ocean. One of the key ingredients you need is space. ghost particles? How do you detect neutrinos?Īs James notes, "the darn things mostly pass straight through whatever detector you build!"īut there are a number of ways to trap a ghost. Michael Latz/Getty Wait! A neutrino detector? But aren't they. The is what a ghost hunter looks like: The main spectrometer of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) is manoeuvred through a road in southern Germany. Now research efforts are focused on elucidating what the mass is. Physics tells us they couldn't change flavor if they were massless. For instance, an electron neutrino might be produced by the sun and then be later detected as a muon neutrino.Īnd such a change implies the neutrino does have mass. Like an almost-empty bag of Mentos, the ghost particle comes in just three distinct flavors - electron, muon and tau - and they can change flavor as they move through space (flavor is the actual terminology, I'm not making that up for this analogy). This "solar neutrino problem" led to a breakthrough discovery: that neutrinos can change flavor. Scientists had suggested the sun should be producing what's known as electron neutrinos, a particular type of the subatomic particle. The puzzle of the neutrino mass first came to light in the 1960s. "The fact they do points us to new physics to enhance our understanding of the universe," notes James. Under the standard model, neutrinos shouldn't have any mass. Studying them for decades has thrown up a bit of a surprise for scientists. Fortunately, there's no exorcism required. Just like a shadowy spirit passing through a wall, the neutrino moves right on through. They don't smash into the atoms that make you up, and so you don't even know they're there. You just don't know it because they interact with hardly anything. Every second of every day since the day you were born, neutrinos have been moving through your body. Other charged particles are at the mercy of magnetic fields, but neutrinos just barrel through the cosmos without impediment a ghostly bullet fired from a monstrous cosmic gun.Īnd, as you read this, trillions of them are zipping through the Earth and straight through you. Like light, they travel in basically a straight line from where they're created in space. ![]() They're also made by some of the most extreme and powerful objects we know of, like supermassive black holes and exploding stars, and they were also produced at the beginning of the universe: the Big Bang. "They are made in the sun, in nuclear reactors, and when high-energy cosmic rays smash into Earth's atmosphere," says Eric Thrane, an astrophysicist at Monash University in Australia. The neutrino is unique because it has a vanishingly small mass and no electrical charge and it's found across the universe. They're excited, and here's why you should be, too. A ghost particle is pretty much a big deal for the same reason, and that's why astrophysicists are trying to trap them. It would change everything we know about the universe. Imagine if we actually captured a ghost and could say the specter was of someone who had died. In early 2022, physicists were able to directly pin down the approximate mass of a neutrino - a discovery that could help uncover new physics or break the rules of the Standard Model. That Antarctic collision was traced to a black hole that shredded a star, for instance, and other neutrinos seem to come via the sun. In recent years, ghost particles have been making headlines for all sorts of reasons and not just because they have a cool name. Oh, "and it's a cool name," according to astrophysicist Clancy James at Curtin University in Western Australia. Though theorized in the 1930s and first detected in the 1950s, neutrinos maintain a mysterious aura, and are often dubbed "ghost particles" - they're not haunting or dangerous, but they just zip through the Earth without us even noticing them. It wasn't an asteroid or alien spacecraft, but a particle that rarely interacts with matter, known as a neutrino. It came from deep space, moving at the speed of light, and crashed into Antarctica. ![]()
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