Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday August 08 2015, @11:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the moah-powah dept.

An experiment built in a vast slab of Antarctic ice recently doubled its count of "cosmic neutrinos" from outer space, by searching for arrivals passing through the planet from the north. The same team this week announced the highest-energy neutrino ever detected.

They have evidence for a neutrino arriving with at least 2,600 trillion electronvolts (teraelectronvolts, TeV) of energy - hundreds of times more than protons inside the Large Hadron Collider, even after its historic revamp.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by xav on Saturday August 08 2015, @01:56PM

    by xav (5579) on Saturday August 08 2015, @01:56PM (#219862)

    How much energy is it, in layman words?
    How many TeV do I need to power my cellphone for one day?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Saturday August 08 2015, @02:02PM

    by ledow (5567) on Saturday August 08 2015, @02:02PM (#219865) Homepage

    There are 6241506 TeV's in one Joule.

    One Joule is the energy transferred (or work done) to an object when a force of one newton acts on that object in the direction of its motion through a distance of one metre (1 newton metre or N·m).

    So... it's a damn pittance of energy, to be honest. But on sub-atomic scales, it's quite a lot.

    This just says what you already now - neutrinos are capable of moving unbelievably fast with a lot of energy.

    But all that crap about the LHC going to blow up the world - the energies it generates are a pittance compared to what's happening, all day, every day, all over the world.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 08 2015, @04:28PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday August 08 2015, @04:28PM (#219905) Journal

      Well, it doesn't just say that neutrinos can go at such high energies (that indeed has been "known" — that is, it is what current theories predict), it says that there are neutrinos that do go at such high energies, which is interesting because this means there must be processes in the universe that give such an energy to a single neutrino.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by ledow on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:31PM

        by ledow (5567) on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:31PM (#219923) Homepage

        Given that a small particle accelerator can do this, is it surprising that things like supernova can too? The orders of magnitude we deal with even in specialist places on Earth are unbelievably small compared to anything out there in the depths of space.

        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:47PM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday August 08 2015, @05:47PM (#219928) Journal

          Please show me the particle accelerator that can produce 2600 TeV neutrinos.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by isostatic on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:25PM

    by isostatic (365) on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:25PM (#219883) Journal

    How many TeV do I need to power my cellphone for one day?

    A modern smart cellphone stores about 5WH in the battery, or 18,000 joules, or about 10^23 electron volts, or 10^11 TEV, or 10^8 of these. In other words this neutrino would power your phone for about 8 milliseconds.