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

Comments and questions about the APOD on the main view screen.
puhbrox
Asternaut
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Joined: Sun Jun 07, 2015 10:49 pm

Re: APOD: Distant Neutrinos Detected Below Ice... (2015 Sep

Post by puhbrox » Wed Sep 02, 2015 10:01 pm

Markus Schwarz wrote:
puhbrox wrote: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.
Chris Peterson wrote:
puhbrox wrote: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.
Thanks for answering my questions! These are some amazing times and goodluck to the team in Antarctica!

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