What happens if neutrinos

Of all the high-energy particles, only weakly interacting neutrinos can directly convey astronomical information from the edges of the universe—from deep inside the most cataclysmic processes. Our current understanding indicates that there are three different types of neutrinos, each relating to a charged particle.

Copiously produced in high-energy collisions, traveling essentially at the speed of light, and unaffected by magnetic fields, neutrinos meet the basic requirements for astronomy. From what we know today, a majority of the neutrinos zooming through space were born around 15 billion years ago, soon after the birth of the universe.

Since that time, the universe has continuously expanded and cooled, and neutrinos have just kept on going. They constitute a cosmic neutrino background radiation similar to the more familiar cosmic microwave background radiation. Waves Quantum 6. Fields 6a. Chicken and Egg; Matter and Field 7. Particles Are Quanta 7a. How Bosons and Fermions Differ 8.

The Basic Idea 1. The Basic Idea 1st version 2. How the Higgs Particle Arises 4. Why Do Particles Decay? Most Particles Decay — But Why? Kaluza-Klein Partners — Why? Step 1 Kaluza-Klein Partners — Why? Higgs Discovery: Is it a Simplest Higgs? Is it a Higgs? Perhaps Composite? A Higgs of Simplest Type? More Than One Higgs? The Higgs FAQ 2.

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Email required Address never made public. Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is That's why this is a neat question; supernovae are unimaginably huge and neutrinos are unimaginably insubstantial. At what point do these two unimaginable things cancel out to produce an effect on a human scale? A paper by radiation expert Andrew Karam provides an answer. It explains that during certain supernovae, the collapse of a stellar core into a neutron star, 10 57 neutrinos can be released one for every proton in the star that collapses to become a neutron.

Karam calculates that the neutrino radiation dose at a distance of one parsec [6] 3. A fatal radiation dose is about 4 sieverts. Core collapse supernovae happen to giant stars, so if you observed a supernova from that distance, you'd probably be inside the outer layers of the star that created it.

The idea of neutrino radiation damage reinforces just how big supernovae are. If you observed a supernova from 1 AU away—and you somehow avoided being being incinerated, vaporized, and converted to some type of exotic plasma—even the flood of ghostly neutrinos would be dense enough to kill you. Prev Next Lethal Neutrinos How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?