Scientists share new details about the mysterious "ghost particle"

[ad_1]

Neutrinos are called ghosts because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, cosmic particles that can pass through any type of matter without changing. They have almost no mass – but scientists have now calculated the mass of the lightest neutrino.

They can travel through the most extreme environments, such as stars, planets and entire galaxies, and remain the same. But neutrinos, although very energetic, have no charge. Even the most powerful magnetic field can not affect them.

Last year, scientists were able to trace for the first time the origins of a small, high energy neutrino. He traveled 3.7 billion light years on Earth. It was discovered by sensors located in the Antarctic ice, in the IceCube detector.

Scientists and observatories around the world have been able to trace the neutrino in a galaxy with a rapidly rotating supermassive black hole in the center called a blazar. The galaxy lies to the left of Orion's shoulder in its constellation and lies about 4 billion light-years away from Earth.

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.

The study published Thursday in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"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. . "These are very weakly interactive ghosts that we know little about, but what we do know is that when they move, they can change their flavor." That can only happen if at least two their masses are non-zero. "

Mixing three different masses is like mixing the flavors of ice cream, he said.

This ghostly subatomic particle could help us understand dark matter

"The three flavors can be compared to ice cream where you have a ball containing strawberry, chocolate and vanilla," said Loureiro. "Three flavors are always present, but in different ratios, and the changing ratio – and the strange behavior of the particle – can only be explained by neutrinos having a mass."

The idea of neutrinos having gathered mass has allowed scientists Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald to obtain the Nobel Prize in Physics 2015.

In order to calculate the low mass of the lightest neutrino, we used data from 1.1 million galaxies collected by particle physicists and cosmologists. This allowed them to measure the rate of expansion of the universe. Neutrinos are widespread in the universe, but difficult to spot. Scientists needed the most data to get the most out of their research.

The giant red stars create a new way to measure the speed of expansion of the universe

"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 large issues that interest both cosmologists and particle physicists. "

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

The researchers found that the mass was 10 million times lighter than an electron. The calculation of this mass can help researchers who study dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe.

[ad_2]

Source link