In a new study, researchers have taken an important step toward understanding how exploding stars can help reveal how neutrinos, mysterious subatomic particles, secretly interact with themselves.
One of the less well-understood elementary particles, neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter, and instead travel invisibly through it at almost the speed of light. These ghostly particles outnumber all the atoms in the universe and are always passing harmlessly through our bodies, but due to their low mass and lack of an electric charge they can be incredibly difficult to find and study.
But in a study published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers at The Ohio State University have established a new framework detailing how supernovae—massive explosions that herald the death of collapsing stars—could be used as powerful tools to study how neutrino self-interactions can cause vast cosmological changes in the universe.
“Neutrinos only have very small rates of interaction with typical matter, so it’s difficult to detect them and test any of their properties,” said Po-Wen Chang, lead author of the study and a graduate student in physics at Ohio State. “That’s why we have to use astrophysics and cosmology to discover interesting phenomena about them.”
Thought to have been important to the formation of the early universe, neutrinos are still puzzling to scientists, despite having learned that they originate from a number of sources, such as in nuclear reactors or the insides of dying stars.
2023-08-16 04:48:03
Link from phys.org