Scientists from Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica assures the ...
A new report suggests that scientists have found more evidence strengthening claims regarding existence of very low mass, high-energy particles that are called cosmic neutrinos. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has reported the discovery by the ...
Editor : Joseph YANCY Category : SCIENCE23 August 2015 / Sunday 01:00:46
Scientists have confirmed the presence of cosmic neutrinos buried deep with Antarctic’s ice sheets. These tiny, energetic particles called neutrinos could have arrived from galaxies such as our Milky Way and beyond.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located near the South Pole helped in this discovery. The observatory has dozens of shafts that reach up to 8,000 feet deep, and its detectors can scan the ice for invisible matter. Cosmic neutrinos are believed to originate from black holes, supernovas and energetic cores of galaxies. These subatomic particles have almost no mass and they pass though the bodies at an infinite pace, at every second of the day.
“These neutrinos may give us an understanding about the origin of the most energetic processes in the universe,” said scientists.
The discovery given an important hint to researchers that neutrinos are nearby. Researchers at IceCube Neutrino Observatory explained that they travel slowly in ice because the speed of light is constant only in empty space. The team analyzed neutrinos hitting the Earth from other directions, and found that they were not tied to the planet’s orbit or rotation. Thus, their source could not be located in the Milky Way. The scientific observatory has detected over 35,000 neutrinos since 2010. About 20 of these high-energy particles were believed to have cosmic origins while the rest was created when the cosmic rays interacted with our planet’s atmosphere.
“Looking for muon neutrinos reaching the detector through the Earth is the way IceCube was supposed to do neutrino astronomy and it has delivered,” explains Francis Halzen, a UW-Madison professor of physics and the principal investigator of IceCube. “This is as close to independent confirmation as one can get with a unique instrument.”
Senior researcher Albrecht Karle said that the energy of those 20 muon neutrinos indicated their extragalactic origin. These special kinds of neutrinos are called as muon neutrinos as they come from the opposite direction compared with other neutrinos discovered in previous phases.
The discovery could begin a new chapter on particle physics, helping scientists to find the early secrets, physical processes and evolution of the universe. The study has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters on Thursday.
The study is detailed in today’s (Aug. 20) issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles produced by the decay of radioactive elements and are elementary particles that lack an electric charge, or, as F. Reines would say, "...the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being".
"The name neutrino was coined by Enrico Fermi as a word play on neutrone, the Italian name of the neutron."
Of all high-energy particles, only weakly interacting neutrinos can directly convey astronomical information from the edge of the universe - and from deep inside the most cataclysmic high-energy processes and as far as we know, there are three different types of neutrinos, each type relating to a charged particle as shown in the following table: https://icecube.wisc.edu/outreach/neutrinos
Nobel prize for physics 2015: how neutrinos saved the world
-- INSERT: Neutrinos: Nature's Ghosts?
Fermilab Published on Jun 18, 2013
Dr. Don Lincoln introduces one of the most fascinating inhabitants of the subatomic realm: the neutrino. Neutrinos are ghosts of the microworld, almost not interacting at all. In this video, he describes some of their properties and how they were discovered. Studies of neutrinos are expected to be performed at many laboratories across the world and to form one of the cornerstones of the Fermilab research program for the next decade or more.
The prize goes to a discovery about the properties of neutrino particles that has saved us from worrying that Earth might end in an icy death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8dRZjOD_ME --
The discovery of neutrino oscillations solved a mystery about the sun’s ability to continue to warm Earth. Photograph: Nasa/SDO/REX/Rex
Stuart Clark @DrStuClark
Tuesday 6 October 2015 08.48 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 6 October 2015 12.33 EDT
Astronomers called it the solar neutrino problem. It was much more than a problem. Upon its discovery in the late 1960s, it meant that the sun could be dying. And if the sun died, so would life on Earth. But thankfully the latest winners of the Nobel prize for physics .. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/06/kajita-and-mcdonald-win-nobel-physics-prize-for-work-on-neutrinos , Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B McDonald, have been addressing such concerns to great success.
The sun .. http://www.theguardian.com/science/sun .. was theorised to be powered by nuclear reactions in its core and these produced neutrino particles. Theoretical models of the sun’s interior had predicted the number of neutrinos that were being produced and by the mid-1960s, two American physicists had taken up the challenge of trying to detect them: Raymond Davis Jr, and John Bahcall.
Neutrinos are incredibly unreactive particles. Davis and Bahcall calculated that they might catch one neutrino per day out of the 10m bn that were expected to be coming from the sun.
Their detector was a cylindrical tank .. http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb/Papers/Popular/Scientificamerican69/scientificamerican69.html .. 20ft in diameter by 48ft long (6 metres by 14.6 metres). It contained 100,000 gallons (455,000 litres) of tetrachloroethylene, which was none other than dry cleaning fluid. A neutrino interacting with a specific isotope of chlorine found in the cleaning fluid would transform it into an isotope of radioactive argon.
They left the argon to build up for a month or two, then collected it by shooting jets of helium gas through the fluid. Finally, they measured its radioactivity to determine how much had been created.
Kajita and McDonald win Nobel physics prize for work on neutrinos
On one hand their experiment was a triumph: they did indeed detect neutrinos. There could be no doubt any more that the sun was a vast nuclear reactor. But the number of captured neutrinos was only about one-third of what they had expected, and that was a big worry.
Although it takes many hundreds of thousands of years for the energy generated in the sun’s core to fight its way to the surface and then fly to Earth, the neutrinos come straight out. So the surface brightness tells us about the ferocity of the nuclear reactions that were taking place hundreds of thousands of years ago. The neutrinos tell us about the reactions taking place today – and there was a clear difference in the two rates.
The most obvious solution was that the sun’s nuclear reactions had dropped to just one-third of their former levels. This was not readily apparent as the older radiation was still percolating out but sometime in the next few hundred thousand years, the brightness of the sun was going to drop indicated by the neutrinos, and that meant Earth was going to suffer a premature, freezing death. The only ray of hope was if there was something wrong with our understanding of the way neutrinos behave.
It had been assumed that neutrinos were essentially massless particles, like the photon particles that carry light. However, if neutrinos did possess a small mass it was theoretically possible that they could change into one of three guises, only one of which would be detectable by Bahcall and Davis’s experiment. Could this be the explanation for the mysterious one-third smaller detection rate, that the neutrinos leaving the sun were “oscillating” between these three different states?
Yes it could, and this is what Kajita and McDonald have just been awarded the 2015 Nobel prize in physics for confirming, by using advanced neutrino detectors in Japan and Canada. And by proving that there was nothing wrong with the nuclear reactions inside the sun, they saved the world from an icy death (sort of).
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