Neutrinos tagged posts

This is one of the highest-energy neutrino events from a survey of the northern sky superimposed on a view of the IceCube Lab at the South Pole. Credit: IceCube Collaboration

Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have sorted through the billions of subatomic particles that zip through its frozen cubic-kilometer-sized detector each year to gather powerful new evidence in support of 2013 observations confirming the existence of cosmic neutrinos.

It heralds a new form of astronomy using neutrinos, the nearly massless high-energy particles generated in nature’s accelerators: black holes, massive exploding stars and the energetic cores of galaxies...

Neutrinos are more abundant than any particle other than photons, yet they interact so weakly with other matter that every second, more than 100 billion stream — mainly unnoticed — through every square centimetre of Earth. Once thought to be massless, they in fact have a minuscule mass and can change type as they travel, a bizarre and entirely unexpected feature that physicists do not fully understand. Indeed, surprisingly little is known about the neutrino. “These are the most ubiquitous matter particles in the Universe that we know of, and probably the most mysterious,” says Nigel Lockyer, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois.

4 unprecedented experiments look poised to change this...