APOD: Distant Neutrinos Detected Below Ice... (2015 Sep 01)

[APOD Robot]

Distant Neutrinos Detected Below Antarctic Ice

Explanation: From where do these neutrinos come? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole of the Earth has begun to detect nearly invisible particles of very high energy. Although these rarely-interacting neutrinos pass through much of the Earth just before being detected, where they started remains a mystery. Pictured here is IceCube's Antarctic lab accompanied by a cartoon depicting long strands of detectors frozen into the crystal clear ice below. Candidate origins for these cosmic neutrinos include the violent surroundings of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, and tremendous stellar explosions culminating in supernovas and gamma ray bursts far across the universe. As IceCube detects increasingly more high energy neutrinos, correlations with known objects may resolve this cosmic conundrum -- or we may never know.

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[Boomer12k]

WHAT A DESOLATE looking Bond location....Movie...."The World Never Ends"... or something....

Why not THE SUN as a source?? The majority of Neutrinos come from Nuclear Reactions in The Sun....why not The Sun????

Interesting how these "small" things have "High Energy"....isn't it?
It is electrically neutral, not affected by EM,...has a very tiny mass, 1 millionth of an Electron....are a Lepton,...not affected by the Strong force, but the weak force, and gravity, but those are so slight at that subatomic level, Neutrinos are not much affected....is identified as a piece of Dark Matter, and passes through PLANETS....

How could such a thing, a Neutrino, contribute to Galactic Lensing, as a piece of Dark Matter, with so little Mass, to affect Spacetime????

AMAZING!!!!!!

Always liked...."This Island Earth"...where the Aliens used....NEUTRINOS to blast things.

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[bystander]

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=35087

[Boomer12k]

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=35087

Thanks for the link....

And YET....after all that....they stopped Here....

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[puhbrox]

These neutrinos sound to me an awful lot like dark energy. I am merely hypothesizing but to me but what else would they fall under? Maybe dark matter? Or do neutrinos fall under ordinary matter? I am clearly not a physicist...

[Markus Schwarz]

These neutrinos sound to me an awful lot like dark energy. I am merely hypothesizing but to me but what else would they fall under? Maybe dark matter? Or do neutrinos fall under ordinary matter? I am clearly not a physicist...

Neutrinos are part of the established standard model of particle physics, and thus are ordinary matter. They are electrically neural, and therefore don't interact with light. Since they don't interact with light, they can be considered as dark matter. But neutrinos don't form the majority of dark matter. The origin of dark matter is currently not known. In any case, dark matter again has completely different properties from dark energy, which is currently a mystery.

[hoohaw]

They are electrically neural.

My brain is electrically neural. Neutrinos are electrically neutral.

[RedFishBlueFish]

Right after thinking how much this view is in concordance with my image of a base on another planet, I was stuck by this being the only structure in view.

One does hope that there is another building somewhere off camera, else if the lab goes up in flames ....

I lived in Alaska for a bit. Anyone who lived out had a cache separate from the cabin - else, being so isolated, if the cabin burned (which is not rare) one would die of exposure or starvation before anyone would notice.

This research station, though remote, is - one suspects - not isolated and if disaster were to strike, it would be noticed quickly but it is clear that relying upon outside rescue is a risky plan.


One hopes there is a Planet-B close at hand.

[paulslittlebit]

RedFishBlueFish https://icecube.wisc.edu/gallery/view/227

[NGC3314]

Why not THE SUN as a source?? The majority of Neutrinos come from Nuclear Reactions in The Sun....why not The Sun????

The Sun is a known neutrino source, but its neutrinos are at much lower energies than IceCube detects - its working technique (Cherenkov radiation) works at crazily high energy, in contrast to the nuclear-transformation method mostly used for solar neutrinos (by other projects).

As someone else wondered - their lab is not isolated; it's one of a cluster of facilities at the Amunden-Scott Station very close to the geographic pole. In one direction (the so-called dark sector), things are laid out to minimize interference from light pollution for sensitive experiments.

[Grouchy]

Sorry, but the graphical representation of the neutrino captures is not a 'cartoon', which is a totally different thing. Why academia insists on misusing this word boggles the mind, and ranks right up there with starting every sentence with the word "So".

(Where's the coffee??!! lol)

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

Or one could build a detector outside (or far from) fission reactors. Neutrinos for peace as stated in this article.

[Chris Peterson]

These neutrinos sound to me an awful lot like dark energy. I am merely hypothesizing but to me but what else would they fall under? Maybe dark matter? Or do neutrinos fall under ordinary matter? I am clearly not a physicist...

No, they sound an awful lot like dark matter, a completely different thing. And indeed, the current view on dark matter is that it's most likely that those particles are very similar to neutrinos in many respects, except for having much higher mass.

Neutrinos are generally categorized as non-luminous ordinary matter. But the entire concept of "ordinary" in this sense is somewhat vague and subject to change.

[neufer]

These neutrinos sound to me an awful lot like dark energy. I am merely hypothesizing but to me but what else would they fall under? Maybe dark matter? Or do neutrinos fall under ordinary matter? I am clearly not a physicist...

No, they sound an awful lot like dark matter, a completely different thing. And indeed, the current view on dark matter is that it's most likely that those particles are very similar to neutrinos in many respects, except for having much higher mass. Neutrinos are generally categorized as non-luminous ordinary matter. But the entire concept of "ordinary" in this sense is somewhat vague and subject to change.

<<Weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter could be gravitationally captured by massive objects like the Sun and accumulate in the core of the Sun. With a high enough density of these particles, they would annihilate with each other at a significant rate. The decay products of this annihilation could decay into neutrinos, which could be observed by IceCube as an excess of neutrinos from the direction of the Sun. This technique of looking for the decay products of WIMP annihilation is called indirect, as opposed to direct searches which look for dark matter interacting within a contained, instrumented volume. Solar WIMP searches are more sensitive to spin-dependent WIMP models than many direct searches, because the Sun is made of lighter elements than direct search detectors (e.g. xenon or germanium). IceCube has set better limits with the 22 string detector (about 1⁄4 of the full detector) than the AMANDA limits.>>

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

That's a lot fancier fishing hut than most.

Ice Phishing.jpg (7.17 KiB) Viewed 3870 times

And they keep the little "neutral "ones.

Guess they have better flavor.

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<In 1930, [Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958)] considered the problem of beta decay. In a letter of 4 December to Lise Meitner et al., beginning, "Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen", he proposed the existence of a hitherto unobserved neutral particle with a small mass, no greater than 1% the mass of a proton, in order to explain the continuous spectrum of beta decay. In 1934, Enrico Fermi incorporated the particle, which he called a neutrino, into his theory of beta decay. The neutrino was first confirmed experimentally in 1956 by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, two and a half years before Pauli's death. On receiving the news, he replied by telegram: "Thanks for message. Everything comes to him who knows how to wait. Pauli."

At the end of 1930, shortly after his postulation of the neutrino and immediately following his divorce in November, Pauli had a severe breakdown. He consulted psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung who, like Pauli, lived near Zurich. Jung immediately began interpreting Pauli's deeply archetypal dreams, and Pauli became one of the depth psychologist's best students. He soon began to criticize the epistemology of Jung's theory scientifically, and this contributed to a certain clarification of the latter's thoughts, especially about the concept of synchronicity. A great many of these discussions are documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom and Archetype. Jung's elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Pauli's dreams is documented in Psychology and Alchemy.>>

[Dad is wattching]

Neutrinos are generally categorized as non-luminous ordinary matter. But the entire concept of "ordinary" in this sense is somewhat vague and subject to change.

I have a couple of questions that I can't find an answers for. Does a neutrino have mass when it at rest? Can a neutrino ever be at rest (no velocity) ? Does a neutrino require velocity to have existence and therefore mass?

[neufer]

Does a neutrino have mass when it at rest? Can a neutrino ever be at rest (no velocity) ?
Does a neutrino require velocity to have existence and therefore mass?

Neutrinos do have a rest mass but none have been observed traveling much slower than the speed of light:

[b][color=#0000FF][size=150]If neutrinos were massless they would all be left handed[/size][/color][/b]

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<<The Standard Model of particle physics assumed that neutrinos are massless. However the experimentally established phenomenon of neutrino oscillation, which mixes neutrino flavour states with neutrino mass states, requires neutrinos to have nonzero masses. Massive neutrinos were originally conceived by Bruno Pontecorvo in the 1950s. Enhancing the basic framework to accommodate their mass is straightforward by adding a right-handed Lagrangian.

The strongest upper limit on the masses of neutrinos comes from cosmology: the Big Bang model predicts that there is a fixed ratio between the number of neutrinos and the number of photons in the cosmic microwave background. If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 eV per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse. This limit can be circumvented by assuming that the neutrino is unstable; however, there are limits within the Standard Model that make this difficult. A much more stringent constraint comes from a careful analysis of cosmological data, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy surveys, and the Lyman-alpha forest. These indicate that the summed masses of the three neutrinos must be less than 0.3 eV. In July 2010 the 3-D MegaZ DR7 galaxy survey reported that they had measured a limit of the combined mass of the three neutrino varieties to be less than 0.28 eV. A tighter upper bound yet for this sum of masses, 0.23 eV, was reported in March 2013 by the Planck collaboration, whereas a February 2014 result estimates the sum as 0.320 ± 0.081 eV based on discrepancies between the cosmological consequences implied by Planck's detailed measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background and predictions arising from observing other phenomena, combined with the assumption that neutrinos are responsible for the observed weaker gravitational lensing than would be expected from massless neutrinos.

On 31 May 2010, OPERA researchers observed the first tau neutrino candidate event in a muon neutrino beam, the first time this transformation in neutrinos had been observed, providing further evidence that they have mass.>>

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

It seems like studying neutrinos has the pre-requisite of being out in the middle of nowhere or deep underground or floating around in large volumes of very clean water.

http://www.wired.com/2012/03/strange-ne ... periments/

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article ... nstruction

Is that because neutrino physicists like their solitude or just don't like the masses? That left-handed spin thing is very odd. Maybe they're all left handed too - that would be an interesting symmetry.

[ta152h0]

Eta Carinae...DO IT ! I demand Resistance is futile

[Just Jackson]

Distant Neutrinos Detected Below Ice Distantly?

If we ever get a JIMO-style mission with a Europa lander, it ought to pay out a line of photo detectors as it melts it's way down to the molten interior. It would only be one string, but if it works (and the ice is clear enough), it would allow some additional triangulation for interstellar neutrino sources, and collect data which could prove or refute neutrino oscillation: a theory put forward to explain the conspicuous lack of predicted solar neutrinos in detectors on Earth.

Europa may be the only other place in the Solar System where this kind of detector could be deployed.

[neufer]

.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

It seems like studying neutrinos has the pre-requisite of being out in the middle of nowhere or deep underground or floating around in large volumes of very clean water. Is that because neutrino physicists like their solitude or just don't like the masses?

That left-handed spin thing is very odd. Maybe they're all left handed too - that would be an interesting symmetry.

Neutrino physicists probably like their solitude & masses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2rFVgvc41E
http://flathatnews.com/2015/09/01/facul ... xperiment/
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150824 ... se-made-of
http://sputniknews.com/science/20150810/1025578854.html

[DavidLeodis]

According to linked information "Neutrinos...come in three flavors". A Choc Ice one would be my favourite but it seems impossible to get!

[neufer]

According to linked information "Neutrinos...come in three flavors".
A Choc Ice one would be my favourite but it seems impossible to get!

Just remember: that's 383 x 10^-25 Calories per scoop.

[DavidLeodis]

According to linked information "Neutrinos...come in three flavors".
A Choc Ice one would be my favourite but it seems impossible to get!

Just remember: that's 383 x 10^-25 Calories per scoop.

That made me neufer. I can safely eats loads without fear of putting on weight!