#borexino

[perpetually-stargazing]

okay I gotta study for finals, but I totally did not do what I intended to with this blog. so ditch the weekly posts, I'll just put something here when I feel like it (sorry sorry sorry)

NEUTRINOS! I'm not gonna get into them with much detail because I am not a particle physicist and I don't know jack. however, what I do know is that they are weakly interacting particles that are suuuuper tiny. I guess what is counterintuitive is that light particles (photons) have 0 mass, and still interact heavily with electromagnetic fields and such. neutrinos, on the other hand, are able to pass through space barely interacting with any type of radiation or field.

this means they are very VERY good at taking away energy from things that don't want it! one such example is the big bright blinding sun. which I feel like I haven't seen in a week...

the Sun is a big ball of hydrogen gas that is constantly fusing into helium gas, and SOMETIMES. very rarely. the helium gas can fuse into carbon, nitrogen, or oxygen. both of these fusion processes release neutrinos, because neutrinos can remove the energy from the Sun more efficiently than photons can. (light from the Sun actually can take thousands of years to reach us! the light that is 8 minutes away is the light that successfully got out of the Sun, so think of it as a backlog, I guess)

since neutrinos are tiny and ignore everything, they whiz right through the Sun's layers and outward into space. sometimes, we can detect them! (this process is huge and interesting and warrants another post and I need to study for my final tomorrow so I'll write about the experimental stuff later), but in 2020, the Borexino collaboration in Gran Sasso, Italy, found pretty solid evidence that they detected a neutrino with the correct amount of energy to be a result of a CNO (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen) fusion cycle, from our Sun.

detecting neutrinos is already hard, and very rare. the fact that we have found one relating to the CNO cycle, which is NOT the dominant fusion cycle in the Sun, is insanely freaking cool and lucky! anyway, I was reading a paper about this and just thought it was fun, this post is filled with unfinished thoughts and half-ramblings, but there's your occasional dose of random physics facts, haha.

happy holidays, everyone :D

[therealuniverse]

Detecting the Sun’s Hidden Neutrinos Neutrinos are nearly massless particles that carry away some of the energy of high-powered events such as atomic fission or fusion inside a star. They travel through space at the speed of light and only rarely interact with most matter – they are only affected by the weak nuclear force (and gravity, although that force is even weaker). Thus, although they are produced throughout the universe and can travel with high energies, they are extremely difficult to detect. This is a photo of the Borexino neutrino detector, built beneath the ground in Italy. 

It is a giant tank shielded from the outside by multiple layers including the covering you see in this shot; all of those are to filter out and block neutrinos other than those of certain energies from entering the tank. When a neutrino with the correct energy enters the tank, it interacts with electrons in an organic solution loaded into the inner tank, eventually producing an electromagnetic signal response (light) that can be detected by instruments on the outer edge of the tank. This instrument previously has been used to detect a variety of neutrinos, including ones produced by radioactive decay inside the Earth and neutrinos produced by other stars out in the universe. There are 2 mechanisms known through which fusion can happen – direct merger of two protons to create helium, or a process called the CNO process where carbon atoms capture 2 separate protons, converting into nitrogen and then oxygen, before a helium atom is released and the carbon atom is restored. In this mechanism, carbon effectively serves as a catalyst for the nuclear reaction. The direct merger mechanism is thought to have occurred when carbon abundances were low in the early universe and in smaller stars, but our star should have enough carbon to produce some of its energy via the CNO reaction. However, because the neutrinos of the CNO process had, within error, the same energy as some fission reactions that occur on Earth, the first decade of operation at Borexino was unable to isolate specific neutrinos from our sun. Recent upgrades to the detector allowed the background neutrino level for the correct energies to be pushed down to the point where the solar CNO neutrinos should have been detected, and in a recent paper the device’s science team announced that they had in fact detected the sun’s CNO neutrinos. These neutrinos from the CNO process are the first true experimental confirmation that the CNO fusion catalyst mechanism actually works; it was hypothesized over 30 years ago but prior to now humans have never been able to verify its occurrence in nature. Understanding the energy released by this mechanism is also important for understanding the makeup of the sun, as there have been several difficulties in fitting observations of motions inside the sun to those predicted by the measured abundances of various elements in our star. -JBB Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borexino#/media/File:Laboratori_Nazionali_del_Gran_Sasso,_Borexino_detector.png References: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.15115.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.2400.pdf

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Physicists spot a new class of neutrinos from the sun

Researchers with the Borexino experiment in Italy have detected neutrinos produced in the secondary fusion process taking place in the sun’s core.

Neutrinos spit out by the main processes that power the sun are finally accounted for, physicists report.

Two sets of nuclear fusion reactions predominate in the sun’s core and both produce the lightweight subatomic particles in abundance. Scientists had previously detected neutrinos from the most prevalent process. Now, for the first time, neutrinos from the second set of reactions have been spotted, researchers with the Borexino experiment said June 23 in a talk at the Neutrino 2020 virtual meeting.

“With this outcome, Borexino has completely unraveled the two processes powering the sun,” said physicist Gioacchino Ranucci of Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Milan.

In the sun’s core, hydrogen fuses into helium in two ways. One, known as the proton-proton chain, is the source of about 99 percent of the star’s energy. The other group of fusion reactions is the CNO cycle, for carbon, nitrogen and oxygen — elements that allow the reactions to proceed. Borexino had previously spotted neutrinos from the proton-proton chain (SN: 9/1/14). But until now, neutrinos from the CNO cycle were MIA.

“They’re top of everybody’s list to try and identify and to spot,” says physicist Malcolm Fairbairn of King’s College London. “Now they think they’ve spotted them, which is a major achievement, really an extremely difficult measurement to make.”

Located deep underground at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, Borexino searches for flashes of light produced as neutrinos knock into electrons in a large vat of liquid. Researchers have spent years fine-tuning the experiment to detect the elusive neutrinos that herald the CNO cycle. Although difficult to observe, the particles are plentiful, Borexino confirmed. On Earth, around 700 million neutrinos from the sun’s CNO cycle pass through a square centimeter each second, the researchers report.

The result, presented for the first time at the virtual meeting, must still clear the hurdle of peer review in a scientific journal before it is fully official.

Studying these particles could help reveal how much of the sun is composed of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, a property known as metallicity. That’s because the rate at which CNO cycle neutrinos are produced depends on the sun’s content of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Different types of measurements currently disagree about the sun’s metallicity, with one technique suggesting higher metallicity than another. In the future, more sensitive measurements of CNO neutrinos could help scientists disentangle the problem.

The CNO cycle is even more important in stars heavier than the sun, where it is the main fusion process. Studying this cycle in the sun can help physicists understand the inner workings of other stars, says Zara Bagdasarian, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the Borexino Collaboration. “It’s very important for us to understand how the sun works.”

[kosmos-x]

Взгляд в сердце Солнца

Расположенный на глубине 1400 метров под итальянским горным массивом Гран-Сассо детектор обеспечи... Читать дальше »

[cronachedalsilenzio-blog]

Esperimento SOX: quando la fantasia supera la realtà, e fa danni

In questi giorni il caos sta investendo i laboratori dell’INFN del Gran Sasso, in Abruzzo. A seguito del dilagare dell’allarmismo, sostenuto anche da un servizio della trasmissione Mediaset Le Iene, nel consiglio regionale abruzzese è stata approvata all’unanimità una mozione per bloccare l’esperimento SOX. Ma com’è possibile che un programma di intrattenimento abbia un ruolo nel fermare un serio…

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[astroblogs]

De leeftijd van een elektron blijkt minstens 66.000 yottajaar te zijn

De Borexino detector (credit: Borexino Collaboration)

Onderzoek met het Borexino experiment in Italië laat zien dat de leeftijd van het elektron minstens 66.000 yottajaar is, in normale wiskundetaal 6,6 x 10^28 jaar, in normale mensentaal zesenzestigduizend keer een quadriljoen jaar, in normale kosmologentaal vijf triljoen keer de leeftijd van het heelal. Elektronen zijn de lichtste elementaire deeltjes die een negatieve elektrische lading dragen. Spontaan kunnen ze niet vervallen, want dat zou een schending van behoud van lading betekenen. Volgens het Standaard Model kunnen elektronen daarom niet vervallen. Maar dat model is niet zaligmakend en daarom houden natuurkundigen er rekening mee dat een elektron héél af en toe wel vervalt en wel in een foton en een neutrino. Dat verval heeft men getracht waar te nemen in dat Borexino experiment, waarbij een vat met 300 ton organische vloeistof, diep onder de grond onder het Gran Sasso gebergte in Italië en naar schatting zo’n 10^32 elektronen bevattend, continue in de gaten wordt gehouden (zie afbeelding hieronder).

Mocht er een elektron op een mooie dag vervallen dan zou het hypothetisch in een foton en neutrino kunnen vervallen, van samen 256 KeV energie. Dat foton zou op haar beurt weer reageren met een ander elektron en dat zou dan opgemerkt moeten worden door één van de 2212 photomultipliers in de detector. Tussen januari 2012 en mei 2013 werd gekeken of men een elektronenverval zag, maar helaas pindakaas, geen verval gezien. Op basis daarvan heeft men die minimumleeftijd van 66.000 yottajaar bepaald – yotta schijnt het grootste officiële voorvoegsel te zijn, het staat voor 10^24. In 1998 had men ook al eens geprobeerd een elektronenverval waar te nemen en toen kwam men uit op een minimumleeftijd van 4.6 ×10^26 jaar, ruim honderd keer korter dan de actuele meting.

Over leeftijden gesproken: protonen schijnen hypothetisch ook te kunnen vervallen. Hun minimale leeftijd is pakweg 1.29×1034 jaar, net zoals de elektronenleeftijd bepaald door experimenten. Ooooohhhh, 66.000 yottajaar stelt helemaal niets voor. Bron: Physics World.

Astroblogs: http://www.astroblogs.nl/2015/12/10/de-leeftijd-van-een-elektron-blijkt-minstens-66-000-yottajaar-te-zijn/

[theoriginalmacattack]

borexino reblogged your post and added:

if it was a bad decision, I wouldn’t have done...

Hitler Chose to make a bad decision also  

[mediumscience]

Scintillator from Borexino, a neutrino detector located in Italy.