Word: chiu
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Long before Brookhaven's scientists started to trap neutrinos, other scientists spun far-ranging theories about the little particles. Neutrinos may be small and shy, says Chinese-born Dr. Hong-Yee Chiu of Yale, but they are vastly important. At last week's Manhattan meeting of the American Physical Society, Physicist Chiu explained that neutrinos may well be the basic stuff of the universe...
Until recently, said Dr. Chiu, stars were thought to lose energy (and therefore mass, which turns into energy) in the form of light, heat and other kinds of electromagnetic radiation. Now many scientists see a different picture. The hot centers of stars are believed to generate neutrinos. Since neutrinos have no mass or electrical charge, they pass through dense matter almost as if it were not there. Neutrinos created near the center of a star would quickly escape into empty space, carrying their energy with them...
...hotter a star gets, says Dr. Chiu, the more neutrinos it generates. When the internal temperature reaches 6 or 7 billion degrees, neutrino production shows a sudden increase. Most of the particles escape with a rush, leaving the star's center almost empty. Then the star collapses and causes a gigantic explosion that sprays ordinary matter as well as neutrinos into space...
Nothing much happens to star-produced neutrinos, says Dr. Chiu. Most of them will probably last unchanged as long as the universe. They will cruise endlessly, moving at the speed of light, their courses curved by the gravitation of nearby stars. In the depths of space they are a hundred thousand times as common as cosmic rays. On the earth, where the nearby sun generates many neutrinos, some 100 billion of them pass through a square centimeter every second. Dr. Chiu estimates that about half of the neutrinos generated by stars could pass through ten billion earths without being absorbed...
Neutrinos, says Dr. Chiu, are the ashes of nuclear fires. According to Italian-born Physicist Bruno Pontecorvo,* they may also be the original stuff of the universe. Somehow they turned into stars. But as the stars burned, they turned into neutrinos again. Ashes to ashes, says the Book of Common Prayer. "Neutrinos to neutrinos," says Dr. Chiu...