About two weeks ago I published a super fact post titled “100 trillion Ghostly Particles Passes Through Your Body Every Second” The exact super fact is below. Little did I know that the Nobel Prize in Physics would be given to Neutrino research. The announcement happened today and I almost missed it.
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.
Briefly, the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Wisconsin Professor Francis Halzen for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from deep space. Antarctica serves as an ideal location for neutrino research because its massive clear ice sheet acts as a giant, transparent detector target for the very hard to detect neutrinos (ghost particles). These are some quick facts about the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This is the press release from the Nobel Committee. This is an announcement featuring popular science. This is the advanced information. This is the New York Times article.
Neutrinos with extremely high energies are created in the same environments as other types of particles. However, unlike other particles, neutrinos reach us without changing direction or losing energy. This means they can provide information that is not available in any other way. As an example, an average photon (light particle) is absorbed and re-emitted roughly billions of trillions of times before escaping the Sun. This process takes ten thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years. Once in open space the photon takes just 8 minutes to reach us, but it is certainly not the “original”, if I put it that way. A neutrino on the other is the original.
You can read more about neutrinos here, and here, here, or here. This is an article from the Scientific American about neutrinos and the discovery of neutrinos coming from the Milky Way.
Physics Related Super Facts
- Some Things Cannot be Known
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- We are Star Dust
- The Speed of Light In Vacuum Is a Universal Constant
- Two events may be simultaneous for some but not for others
- The Strange Worlds of Exoplanets
- The vastness of space and the beginning of infinity
- The Bizarre Reality of Black Holes
- Every Symmetry is Associated with a Conservation Law
- GPS uses relativity for accuracy
- Time Dilation Goes Both Ways
- The Pole-Barn Paradox and Solution
- The Enormous Kuiper belt
- Time is a Fourth Dimension
- Electric Charge is not the only type of Fundamental Charge
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- Magnetars Super Magnets in the Sky
- Neutron Stars Trillions of Times Denser than the Sun
- The Universe has a Redshift and its Increasing
- Electrons Have Spin Without Spinning
- We Can See What Stars Are Made of
- Stars Twinkle but Planets Do Not
- Pulsars the Cosmic Lighthouses
- Light is Beyond the Reach of Time
- The speed of light is the speed of causality
- The Strong Nuclear Force Increases with Distance
- 100 trillion Ghostly Particles Passes Through Your Body Every Second
