For the First Time Scientists Detect Neutrinos Traced To CNO Cycle Inside the Sun (nbcnews.com) 20
NBC News calls it "the ghostly signal that reveals the engine of the universe." Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares their report:
In research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists reported that they've made the first detection of almost-ethereal particles called neutrinos that can be traced to carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion, known as the CNO cycle, inside the sun. It's a landmark finding that confirms theoretical predictions from the 1930s, and it's being hailed as one of the greatest discoveries in physics of the new millenium. "It's really a breakthrough for solar and stellar physics," said Gioacchino Ranucci of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), one of the researchers on the project since it began in 1990.
The scientists used the ultrasensitive Borexino detector at the INFN's Gran Sasso particle physics laboratory in central Italy — the largest underground research center in the world, deep beneath the Apennine Mountains, about 65 miles northeast of Rome. The detection caps off decades of study of the sun's neutrinos by the Borexino project, and reveals for the first time the main nuclear reaction that most stars use to fuse hydrogen into helium... Scientists calculate that the CNO cycle is the primary type of fusion in the universe. But it's hard to spot inside our relatively cool sun, where it accounts for only 1 percent of its energy...
Ranucci said the Borexino detector has spent decades measuring neutrinos from the sun's main proton-proton chain reaction, but detecting its CNO neutrinos has been very difficult — only about seven neutrinos with the tell-tale energy of the CNO cycle are spotted in a day. The discovery required making the detector ever more sensitive over the last five years, Ranucci said, by shielding it from outside sources of radioactivity so that the inner chamber of the detector is the most radiation-free place on Earth.
The scientists used the ultrasensitive Borexino detector at the INFN's Gran Sasso particle physics laboratory in central Italy — the largest underground research center in the world, deep beneath the Apennine Mountains, about 65 miles northeast of Rome. The detection caps off decades of study of the sun's neutrinos by the Borexino project, and reveals for the first time the main nuclear reaction that most stars use to fuse hydrogen into helium... Scientists calculate that the CNO cycle is the primary type of fusion in the universe. But it's hard to spot inside our relatively cool sun, where it accounts for only 1 percent of its energy...
Ranucci said the Borexino detector has spent decades measuring neutrinos from the sun's main proton-proton chain reaction, but detecting its CNO neutrinos has been very difficult — only about seven neutrinos with the tell-tale energy of the CNO cycle are spotted in a day. The discovery required making the detector ever more sensitive over the last five years, Ranucci said, by shielding it from outside sources of radioactivity so that the inner chamber of the detector is the most radiation-free place on Earth.
the Sun (Score:3)
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It's really a miasma of incandescent plasma - the Sun's not simply made out of gas!
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No, the "nuclear furnace" part is small, a ball less than 25% the sun's diameter, less than 0.8% the volume.
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A ball that is slightly less than .8% of the sun's volume is still GIGANTIC. Bigger than the Earth. And a whole heaping lot bigger than you or I.
Anyway, the poster was quoting this song [youtube.com].
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Um, when I went to school the volume of a sphere was 4/3 pi r^3.
So 1/4 of the diameter would be 1/64 of the volume, about 1.6%
That said, I thought that the reason that the reason that there were no neutrenos was because the Sun had gone out. It takes many thousands of years for the heat to get from the center to the surface, so it could have gone out long ago and we would not notice.
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well, actually we detected about 1/3 the neutrinos we'd thought we'd get from p-p fusion. Neutrino oscillation was the reason, neutrinos change flavor and so we know they have non-zero mass and don't quite go lightspeed.
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1/4 the radius, not 1/4 the diameter.
Not what I was expecting (Score:2)
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Late to the Party (Score:4, Informative)
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... on results presented back in June.
But, peer review takes a while.
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And I should expect "posts" from slashdotters?
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The Bad Astronomer reported on this back in August.
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/after-nearly-a-century-elusive-cno-neutrinos-are-finally-seen-from-the-sun [syfy.com]
Fortunately the news about the physics of fusion within the sun still gets to slashdot much faster than light from where it is emitted in the sun.
However if you take into account the current speed at which posts favouring white nationalism jump legitimate science posts and factor in the fascist stupidity coefficient in the USA, one can conclude that /. is actually posting news before it even happens.
I postulate that any new scientific post on slashdot will directly result in anti-science idiotic response
I’ll wait for the peer review (Score:1)
There’s been several instances of bad science (or perhaps “hasty” would be a better word) coming out of Italy during the past several years. Maybe this is as cool as it sounds, but I’ll wait until se get some confirmation from other researchers before lending too much credence to this.
Time to retire (Score:2)
Let's mine those metals for space travel (Score:2)
Has NASA already got some budget allocated for that?
SNU (Score:2)
So they finally found the last of the SNU.