Scientists reveal new details about "ghost particles" that are key to the origins of the universe

Neutrinos are cosmic particles often called "ghost particles" because they are extremely volatile and can pass through any type of matter without changing and a new study, published in the journal Letters of physical examination, suggests that these neutrinos can be 10 million times lighter than the mass of an electron.

Neutrinos are scattered throughout the universe and they have almost no mass. However, scientists have now calculated the lightest neutrino mass, which is about 10 million times lighter than an electron. Calculating this mass can help in the search for dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe.

The researchers used the supercomputer, called Grace, from University College London to create a mathematical model. Grace worked on half a million hours of computing, which would have taken 60 years with a single processor.

Neutrino particles are very energetic but have no charge. Therefore, even the most powerful magnetic field can not affect them. They can travel through the most extreme environments, such as stars, planets and entire galaxies, and remain the same.

Previous scientists have discovered that neutrinos travel at a speed close to the speed of light, and a CERN experiment suggested that these particles could eventually exceed the speed of light. However, it was later discovered that it was wrong because of faulty test equipment.

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"One hundred billion neutrinos traverse your thumb of the sun every second, even at night," said Arthur Loureiro, author of the study and PhD student at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London. . "They are very weakly interactive ghosts that we know little about. What we do know is that as they move, they can move from one to the other, and this can only happen if at least two of their masses are non-zero. "

Scientists and observatories around the world were able to trace the neutrino up to a galaxy, which included a supermassive, the rapidly rotating black hole, the blazar. A blazar is an active galactic core with a relativistic jet composed of ionized matter moving almost at the speed of light directed very close to the Earth. The galaxy is about 4 billion light-years from Earth and is located to the left of Orion's shoulder in its constellation.

Last year, scientists traced for the first time the origins of a small, high-energy neutrino, which had traveled 3.7 billion light-years on Earth. It was discovered by sensors located in the Antarctic ice, in the IceCube detector.

Different types of neutrinos appear as three different masses, but the lightest was unknown until now. And astronomers still do not know much about the differences between these three types. However, they say that the three types are still present, but in different ratios, and that the evolution of the report and the strange behavior of the particle can only be explained by the fact that the neutrinos have a mass.

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Scientists used data from 1.1 million galaxies, collected by particle physicists and cosmologists, to calculate the lightest neutrino mass. This allowed them to measure the rate of expansion of the universe. Neutrinos can be prevalent in the universe, but they are hard to spot. This is why scientists needed as much data as possible for research.

"We used information from various sources, including space and ground telescopes observing the first glimmers of the Universe, exploding stars, the largest 3D map of galaxies in the universe, accelerators particles, nuclear reactors, etc., "said Loureiro. "Since neutrinos are abundant but tiny and elusive, we needed all the knowledge available to calculate their mass and our method could be applied to other big questions that are of interest to both cosmologists and particle physicists. "