100 trillion Ghostly Particles Passes Through Your Body Every Second

Super fact 132 : An estimated 100 trillion ghostly elementary particles, called neutrinos, pass through your body every second, which is 237 sextillion particles in 75 years. Despite that fact the chance that even a single neutrino will interact with an atom in your body during your entire life is about 1 in 4. These extremely abundant particles pass right through you as well as planets without interactions, like ghosts.

The picture shows a transparent glass like human body and thousands of racing particles passing right through the body. | 100 trillion Ghostly Particles Passes Through Your Body Every Second
100 trillion neutrinos, almost entirely undetectable elementary particles, pass right through your body every second, without touching a single atom in your body, as if you don’t exist. I generated the picture with the help of ChatGPT.

Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles, often called ‘ghost particles‘ because they barely interact with anything else.  They are capable of passing right through our planet Earth as if it wasn’t there. As mentioned, an estimated 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second.

Neutrinos do not interact with electromagnetic forces and not with the strong nuclear force. The electromagnetic forces are what is governing molecules, atoms, and matter and the strong nuclear force governs the nucleus of atoms. The only forces that neutrinos interact with are the weak nuclear force and gravity, which both are weak forces, and the weak nuclear force has a very short range. In addition, the mass of neutrinos is extremely tiny. That is why neutrinos pass through atoms as if they aren’t there, and it is why trillions of neutrinos can pass through your body without touching you even the slightest and it is also why they are completely harmless. This also makes them extremely hard to detect.

The illustration depicts different kinds of radiation hitting different obstacles including a sheet of paper, a sheet of aluminum foil, a sheet of lead, a container / pool of water, and planet earth. There are different kinds of rays that are stopped by the different obstacles, except the neutrinos go through everything.
Alpha radiation is stopped by paper. Beta radiation (electrons) is stopped by aluminum foil. X-rays and gamma radiation (high energy photons) are stopped by a sheet of lead. Neutrons with certain energies can be stopped by a container of water. Neutrinos cannot even be stopped by a planet. Shutterstock asset id: 2313420693 by Anshuman Rath

An enormous amount of neutrinos flows right through your body as if you don’t exist. They are coming from the sky and from the ground below after passing through earth and none of them will touch any part of you. This is a mind blowing and surprising but not well known fact and therefore a super fact in my opinion.

The Mass of Elementary Particles

More than 200 subatomic particles have been discovered and there are probably many more that have not yet been discovered. Examples of subatomic particles are protons, neutrons and electrons. However, only some of them are elementary particles, or in other words fundamental particles. The electron is a fundamental particle, but the proton and the neutrons are not. Protons and neutrons are called composite particles and consist of quarks, gluons and mesons. The neutrino is an example of a fundamental particle like the electron. Quarks are other examples of fundamental particles.

The illustration is a map of the 17 fundamental particles, but the anti-particles are not included. There are six leptons including the electron and neutrino, six quarks, and five bosons, the photon, gluon, Z Boson, W Boson, and the Higgs Boson. | 100 trillion Ghostly Particles Passes Through Your Body Every Second
There are 17 elementary particles, 34 if you count their anti-particles and 61 if you count all flavors. It is possible to count even more of them if you count left-right-handedness and polarization as separate types of particles. This is the Standard Model of Elementary Particles Shutterstock asset id: 2148276355 by alionaursu

Electrons are lightweight. They weigh 0.511 MeV/c², which is 1,836 times lighter than a proton, which weighs 938.272 MeV/c². The positron, which is the electrons anti-particle weighs exactly the same as the electron. The muon, which is very similar to an electron but is unstable and is 206.77 times heavier than an electron weighs 105.66 MeV/c². The tau is also similar to an electron and is about 3,477 times heavier than an electron and weighs 1,776.86 MeV/c². Quarks are also much heavier than electrons. Photons and gluons are massless.

The neutrino is a lepton and is in some ways similar to an electron, but it has no charge and does not interact with electromagnetic forces at all. The neutron also does not have any charge, but it does interact with electromagnetic forces, which makes it a lot easier to detect. As in the case for the electron there are lighter and heavier versions of neutrinos, the electron-neutrino, the muon-neutrino and the tau-neutrino. Here comes the shocker; the heaviest flavor of neutrino, the tau-neutrino weighs less than 0.12 eV/c² or 0.00000012 MeV/c² making it at least 4 million times lighter than an electron. However, the neutrinos may be a lot lighter than that. We don’t know. They have mass but it is very tiny.

Considering how tiny neutrinos are, and that they don’t interact with the electromagnetic force at all (unlike other neutral particles) and don’t interact with the strong nuclear force at all, it is understandable that neutrinos are like ghost particles, almost impossible to detect. Neutrinos are too light to be so called dark matter, but a hypothetical heavier form of neutrino called the sterile neutrino is a plausible candidate for dark matter.

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Author: thomasstigwikman

My name is Thomas Wikman. I am a software/robotics engineer with a background in physics. I am currently retired. I took early retirement. I am a dog lover, and especially a Leonberger lover, a home brewer, craft beer enthusiast, I’m learning French, and I am an avid reader. I live in Dallas, Texas, but I am originally from Sweden. I am married to Claudia, and we have three children. I have two blogs. The first feature the crazy adventures of our Leonberger Le Bronco von der Löwenhöhle as well as information on Leonbergers. The second blog, superfactful, feature information and facts I think are very interesting. With this blog I would like to create a list of facts that are accepted as true among the experts of the field and yet disputed amongst the public or highly surprising. These facts are special and in lieu of a better word I call them super-facts.

45 thoughts on “100 trillion Ghostly Particles Passes Through Your Body Every Second”

  1. Thomas, this is a fascinating reminder that the universe can be passing through us every second without leaving the slightest trace. I particularly love the comparison to ghosts, except these ghosts can pass straight through an entire planet! The sheer scale of 100 trillion neutrinos every second is almost impossible to picture. Science has a wonderful way of making the invisible feel astonishingly real.

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    1. Thank you so much Patricia. I thought it is a mind-blowing fact. I’ve read about it the first time when I was a kid interested in physics. This has been known for a long time. However, now we know a lot more about neutrinos than we did 50 years ago. Neutrinos are strange and very hard to study due to their hard to detect nature, but also fascinating and there are so many of them all around us and inside of us.

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  2. Well, ghost neutrinos caught my attention! So interesting, but I have heard of them from watching the TV shows, Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon. They mention all these things quite often. Still it is weird that they pass through us and we don’t even know or feel anything. What are they even good for, or their purpose? 🙂

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    1. Yes I can understand that they caught your attention and it is great that you knew about them already. I agree, it is weird that trillions are passing right through us every second and not a single atom is touched. They go right through all the atoms and only extremely rarely interact with one.

      I am not sure about purpose but they were first postulated in 1930 to explain why radiative decay seems to be mysteriously losing some energy. The German physicist Wolfgang Pauli, said it must be a particle that is impossible to detect (or near impossible to detect). In 1970 the first one was detected. As for being useful, there is potential. Since they go through everything, including entire planets, you could potentially use them to spy on things hidden deep in the ground, or things hidden behind planets and stars. Light /electromagnetic radiation particles, called photons, are also numerous but they get absorbed and re-emitted all the time so you can’t use them to see through dense matter. The cosmic background radiation (photons) from the Big Bang is from 380,000 years after the Big Bang for that reason. However, the Universe is filled with neutrinos that come from only 1 second after the Big Bang. It is called the cosmic neutrino background radiation. There is potential. It is difficult to use that potential but it exist.

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    1. Thank you Marsha, and ha ha, your 237 sextillionth birthday is coming up soon. Happy birthday. Incidentally, I am currently reading a book about vampires and they can live very long. About your question “purpose”. Barbara above asked the same question and my answer is below.

      I am not sure about purpose but they were first postulated in 1930 to explain why radiative decay seems to be mysteriously losing some energy. The German physicist Wolfgang Pauli, said it must be a particle that is impossible to detect (or near impossible to detect). So, they participate in radioactive decay. In 1970 the first one was detected. As for being useful, there is potential. Since they go through everything, including entire planets, you could potentially use them to spy on things hidden deep in the ground, or things hidden behind planets and stars. Light / electromagnetic radiation particles, called photons, are also numerous but they get absorbed and re-emitted all the time so you can’t use them to see through dense matter (well there’s glass). The cosmic background radiation (photons) from the Big Bang is from 380,000 years after the Big Bang for that reason. However, the Universe is filled with neutrinos that come from only 1 second after the Big Bang. It is called the cosmic neutrino background radiation. There is potential. It is difficult to use that potential but it exist.

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    1. Thank you Robbie. I agree it is strange. But it is cool to think that you have a lot more neutrinos in your body than cells right now, and none of them touches a single atom in you. They go just through all atoms.

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  13. This is one of those things that I will just never fully comprehend. Not only is it so complex, but it’s just weird to think about there being so much out there that we can’t feel or see or even detect.

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    1. Yes I agree that is very strange. Imagining neutrinos, more of them in your body then there are cells, passing right through all the atoms in your body as if the atoms don’t exist, is strange. They are filling up the entire Universe and a large portion of them come from just 1 second after the Big Bang.

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    1. They were proposed in 1930 by the German physicist Wolfgang Pauli because radioactive decay lost a bit of energy. He suggested that the lost energy was a particle that was impossible or almost impossible to detect. Soon it got the name neutrino by Enrico Fermi. It was first detected in 1970. They searched for it for 40 years. It is extremely difficult to detect but not impossible. This is a link to the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica.

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    1. phasmophobia, I had to look that up. Elementary particles sometimes has funny nick names, or even funny official names. Neutrinos – ghost particles, Higgs Boson – God particle, and the quarks: charm, strange, truth and beauty.

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            1. There are also the two branches of quantum statistics. One for matter particles called Fermi statistics (after physicist Enrico Fermi) and one for bosons (radiation particles) called Bose-Einstein statistics named again after Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein who invented it together. There is also a state of matter that happens at extreme colds called Bose-Einstein condensate, same situation as with Bose-Einstein statistics. Bose is in a lot of places in quantum physics.

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                1. Yes he was one of the major contributors to particle physics and quantum mechanics. However, he did not get the nobel prize in physics, which many see as an oversight. However, his most prominent achievement was probably the Bose-Einstein condensate was only proven experimentally in 1995, and he was long dead by then, and the nobel committee don’t give nobel prizes posthumously. However, a number of later physicists who worked on the Bose-Einstein condensate and Bose-Einstein statistics got the nobel prize.

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