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Sun Microsystems Space Science

CNO Neutrinos From the Sun Are Finally Detected (syfy.com) 32

Posted by BeauHD from the one-century-later dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SyFy: For the first time, scientists have detected neutrinos coming from the Sun's core that got their start via the CNO process, an until-now theorized type of stellar nuclear fusion. [...] The Borexino neutrino observatory is 1400 meters under the rock below the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. It has an 8.5 meter wide nylon balloon filled with 280 tons of pseudocumene, surrounded by a tank of water, surrounded by over 2200 very sensitive photon detectors. They turned everything on, then waited. Over the course of July 2016 - February 2020 (1072 days), they painstakingly recorded all the events, and had to go through heroic efforts to prevent all manners of other reactions that also create little light flashes from interfering with their experiment. They also had to distinguish proton-proton chain neutrinos from ones made in the CNO cycle, but the neutrinos have different energies, which makes it possible to separate them out. They just announced their results: They detected the CNO neutrinos! About 20 per day interacted with the pseudocumene -- 20 per day, when sextillions of them had passed through! -- about what you'd expect from theory.

This is an important discovery for a lot of reasons. For one thing, while the proton-proton chain dominates in the Sun, in stars with more than about 1.3 times the Sun's mass the CNO cycle dominates (it kicks in strongly at higher temperatures), so knowing how it works in the Sun tells us about other stars. Also, the presence of heavier elements (what astronomers misleadingly call metals, meaning any element heavier than hydrogen and helium) can affect the fusion rate in the Sun's CNO cycle, and the amount of these metals isn't perfectly well known; different methods to measure them yield slightly different amounts, but enough to mess up what we know about the fusion in the core. This experiment agrees with ones that find a lower metal content. That has a ripple effect on a lot of other ideas, including details on how we think the Sun and planets formed, how the Sun ages, and how it will die. All that, from less than two dozen neutrinos a day, while countless more go undetected.
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CNO Neutrinos From the Sun Are Finally Detected More

CNO Neutrinos From the Sun Are Finally Detected

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  • For seriously? (Score:5, Funny)

    by theJavaMan ( 539177 ) on Saturday August 08, 2020 @08:10AM (#60379937)

    A Sun Microsystems logo on a story about the actual Sun?

    I'm a millennial, but even I know that Sun Microsystems existed. They gave us Java, Solaris, and dashed hopes!

    • Don't forget they also gave us "it's a Unix system!"

    • It's just a bug. Google raised the prices on their AI services so they had to replace the previous AI script known as BeauHD with some junky code written by a tween for a university assignment. As usual in those Computer Science 201 AI classes the code doesn't really produce perfect results the first 100 iterations.

    • And in some cases, a salary.

    • It's ridiculous, isn't it? Should have been a QNX logo of course.

    • Might as well reuse the category since there won't be many stories about Sun Microsystems nowadays.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      A Sun Microsystems logo on a story about the actual Sun?

      I'm a millennial, but even I know that Sun Microsystems existed. They gave us Java, Solaris, and dashed hopes!

      Did Oracle renew the trademark, or has it been abandoned? Because just like the old Digital Equipment Corp logo, you start seeing it everywhere. I remember seeing it on a bunch of audio interfaces at a music store, and it's prolific on Alibaba.

      I'm guessing Sun-based things are less popular so you don't see it as much as "digital" things. But co

  • Science! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Saturday August 08, 2020 @08:28AM (#60379967)
    This is the most sciency science article in a long time. Not in a bad jargony way, but in a "new observations of a physical process confirm one hypothesis while ruling out others" way.
  • SyFy? Is that the television channel that gives us professional wrestling and ghost hunting?

  • Phys.org article (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    An article [phys.org] from a place other than the syfy channel.
    • Actually, the SyFy article is MUCH better.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's longer and more explanatory generally, but it takes the finding as fact and doesn't mention that it has yet to be peer reviewed.

        • Peer review is an important component of the scientific process, but it is not the sole determiner of fact or fiction. Many things that pass peer review are false, and many things that don't pass review are true. In this particular case, for example, the peer reviewers are less qualified to make a judgement about the fact of what was observed than the people who published the results. They probably can't do so, unless the paper makes a significant and obvious error in the analysis process, because the revie

    • Re:Phys.org article (Score:5, Informative)

      by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Saturday August 08, 2020 @12:47PM (#60380415) Homepage

      An article from a place other than the syfy channel.

      Strange as it is, the article on Syfy is written by someone who knows what he is talking about: Phil Plait [wikipedia.org].

      He started BadAstronomy.com [wikipedia.org] about two decades ago, then moved it to various places, including Slate, Forbes, and now Syfy.

      He also wrote a book called Bad Astronomy [wikipedia.org] about the Moon Hoax.

      You should also watch his Astronomy Crash Course [youtube.com] on Youtube. Very informative.

      Please mod my comment up so people know ...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by habig ( 12787 )
        He also wrote a great book "Death from the Skies" about all the ways astronomy can kill you. Dinosaurs being only one example. His blog is wonderful: my objection below was mostly aimed at the Slashdot editors who breathlessly attached a "Just Released!" tag to a nice explanation of a result from June.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kbahey ( 102895 )

          Yeah, they also used the Sun Microsystems logo for "Neutrinos from the Sun"! Go figure.
          I complained about it in another comment, listing past errors too ...

          Were you able to find an RSS feed for the bad astronomy blog on Syfy? I searched but could not find one.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by habig ( 12787 )
            Have not looked for an RSS feed, although Plait's blog is one of the few out there I'd actually want push notifications for :)
  • How about back at the end of June, at the big conference in the field of neutrinos, rather than months later by the SyFy channel? Slides from talk: https://indico.fnal.gov/event/... [fnal.gov] Video of talk: https://indico.fnal.gov/event/... [fnal.gov]

  • The icon used for this story about Neutrinos from the Sun [slashdot.org], has the "Sun Microsystems" logo!

    Previously, we saw the Blue Pill/Red Pill from The Matrix movie used for "Active Matrix OLED [slashdot.org]".

    We also saw the logo of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used for generic "digital" things, such as Microsoft banning the Confederate Flag in games [slashdot.org].

    That is why CmdrTaco cries himself to sleep every day ...

    Mod this post up so the moderators know what these logos/icons mean ...

  • It's when the neutrinos occasionally hit the hydrocarbon solvent pseudocumene that a photon of light is produced which is then detected by the sensitive photodetectors.

  • CNO (Score:2)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Carbon–Nitrogen–Oxygen

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