Astronomers propose building a neutrino telescope -- out of the Pacific Ocean

[Judi Lynn]

By Paul Sutter published about 21 hours ago

Meet the ambitious P-ONE proposal.

Neutrinos are one of the most elusive particles in the cosmos, second only to ultra-mysterious dark matter. They are made in considerable quantity — they participate in the weak nuclear force and they're responsible for nuclear fusion and decay. So any time something nuclear is happening, neutrinos are involved.

For example, the sun's core is a giant nuclear fusion reaction, so naturally, it's producing quite a few neutrinos. If you hold your thumb up to the sun, approximately 60 billion neutrinos will pass through your thumbnail every second, according to past studies.

But neutrinos interact so rarely with matter that despite the trillions upon trillions of them passing through your body every second, in your entire life, the total number of neutrinos that will actually hit your body is about … one.

Neutrinos are so ghostly and effervescent that, for decades, physicists assumed that these particles were completely massless, traveling through the universe at the speed of light. But after mountains of evidence began to pile up, scientists discovered that neutrinos do have a tiny amount of mass.

More:
https://www.space.com/pacific-ocean-neutrino-detector-p-one-concept

[jaxexpat]

1. A "peaceful" solution for the neutrino watchers.

[Javaman]

2. what would happen if a neutrino did hit one of us? just curious. nt