Saturday, June 21, 2025

That one might leave a mark

 

Neutrinos.

They are very weird.

They can pass through a lot of matter without interacting with any of it. To make observations of neutrinos, researchers have resorted to putting detectors in deep mines or deep underwater so that the matter screens out everything else, leaving just the neutrinos to OCCASIONALLY interact with the detector elements.

They are, in terms that aren't exactly accurate physics, very low mass (but they aren't massless). Despite that, hey can pack a lot of energy.

For more information, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has this site: What's a neutrino?

So, speaking of a lot of energy, this one did pack a wallop (and amazingly enough, it was detected, too):

The Most Energetic Neutrino Ever Seen Makes a Mediterranean Splash
A “ghost particle” discovered by a detector in the Mediterranean carried 30 times more energy than any neutrino observed to date
"This [neutrino] one’s discovery and characterization comes from a predominantly European collaboration dubbed KM3NeT, a sprawling neutrino telescope that is still under construction and that, once fully built, will use about a cubic kilometer of instrument-laced Mediterranean seawater as the basis of its two distinct detectors. Yet even in its incomplete state, the project has delivered a stunning result—a neutrino that likely hails from beyond the galaxy and that contains unprecedented power.

“It’s in a completely unexplored region of energy, 30 times higher than any previous observation of neutrinos,” said Paschal Coyle, a neutrino physicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a member of the KM3NeT team, during a press conference about the research that was held on Tuesday."
Here's a link to the actual paper about it:


Since I can't snow a picture of a neutrino (that would be difficult, though there is an illustration of the event in the paper), I'll show a picture of the KM3NeT detectors.



No comments: