Posts in astrophysics

Well, I thought I was done with neutrino astrophysics yesterday, but then I read about the recent discovery of two extremely high-energy neutrinos by the IceCube collaboration.

As you've probably guessed by now, there's a lot we don't know about neutrinos and how they function in astrophysics. They have a lot of mysteries in store for us. Here are a few:

Apart from the neutrinos from the Sun, we can also observe neutrinos from high-energy cosmic events. The best example of this is supernova 1987A, a stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy, whose light reached us in February of 1987.

The neutrino detectors discussed in the last post are all well and good, but there's a bit of a problem, and it's substantial enough to have earned itself a catchy name: the solar neutrino problem.

Neutrino detection is a tricky enterprise in the best of cases. Since neutrinos interact only via the weak interaction, their interactions have fantastically low cross-sections, which means that detectors end up seeing only a couple of neutrinos per day in some of the better cases.