Posts in neutrinos

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.

When last we left our heroes, the Sudbury Solar Neutrino Observatory (SNO) had concluded that while predictions for the total flux of neutrinos at the Earth were accurate, only about a third of those that reach us are electron neutrinos. This naturally begs the question: what are the rest of them?

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.