Tesseract
28th August 2014, 03:23
Thought this was interesting enough to post:
Neutrinos from other processes in the Sun have been detected previously, but those produced by proton-proton reactions are particularly hard to detect because their low energy places them in a range where natural radioactivity masks their interactions.
Pocar and colleagues used the Borexino neutrino detector at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratories to successfully find these elusive particles.
Borexino is the only detector on Earth capable of observing the entire spectrum of solar neutrinos simultaneously.
Pocar and colleagues plan to use the Borexino neutrino detector to try and study the internal chemical composition and structure of the Sun.
"The precision of this measurement wasn't enough to discriminate between two models of the Sun which differ in the amount of heavier elements like carbon and oxygen," says Pocar.
"If we could determine the metallicity [elements heavier than hydrogen and helium] in the Sun, it would tell us a lot about stellar physics, and give us a lot of information about heavier stars further away which fuse these heavier elements."
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/08/28/4075509.ht
Neutrinos from other processes in the Sun have been detected previously, but those produced by proton-proton reactions are particularly hard to detect because their low energy places them in a range where natural radioactivity masks their interactions.
Pocar and colleagues used the Borexino neutrino detector at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratories to successfully find these elusive particles.
Borexino is the only detector on Earth capable of observing the entire spectrum of solar neutrinos simultaneously.
Pocar and colleagues plan to use the Borexino neutrino detector to try and study the internal chemical composition and structure of the Sun.
"The precision of this measurement wasn't enough to discriminate between two models of the Sun which differ in the amount of heavier elements like carbon and oxygen," says Pocar.
"If we could determine the metallicity [elements heavier than hydrogen and helium] in the Sun, it would tell us a lot about stellar physics, and give us a lot of information about heavier stars further away which fuse these heavier elements."
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/08/28/4075509.ht