Sentences with phrase «so electron neutrinos»

The laws of physics may permit a neutrino with a mass to change from one type into another, so electron neutrinos may simply transform themselves into undetectable muon or tau neutrinos before they fly across the 150 million kilometres of space between the Sun and the Earth.

Not exact matches

But the weak nuclear force — responsible for making neutrons decay into protons, electrons and neutrinos — might not be so essential (SN: 4/29/17, p. 22).

But if they are within 100,000 times or so the mass of normal neutrinos — or a few thousand electron volts — most should still exist, with some occasionally decaying into lighter neutrinos and X-ray photons.

In the paper, Glashow and Cohen point out that if neutrinos can travel faster than light, then when they do so they should sometimes radiate an electron paired with its antimatter equivalent — a positron — through a process called Cerenkov radiation, which is analogous to a sonic boom.

So rather than, say, a 10 percent chance of an electron neutrino turning into a muon neutrino, for example, physicists wonder if the odds are lower that an electron antineutrino turns into a muon antineutrino.

Carrying no electrical charge, neutrinos are attracted neither to protons nor electrons, so they don't interact with electromagnetic fields.

Since 1998, physicists have also known that neutrinos can change type as they zing along at near light - speed, so that a muon neutrino can become an electron neutrino, and so on.

For example, electron neutrinos born in the sun morph into other flavors before they reach Earth, so that fewer electron neutrinos arrive than would otherwise be expected.

In doing so, Daya Bay researchers searched for a faster, smaller oscillation imposed on top of the longer, slower one that accounts for the disappearance of electron neutrinos from the sun, which is dominated by a different mixing angle.

In addition to these particles, there are heavier particles, which don't appear in ordinary matter because there's so heavy; they're unstable and they decay into the particle's I mentioned — electrons, neutrinos and the two lightest types of quarks.

So in the very early Universe, some 17 keV neutrinos could have been transformed into electron neutrinos before they could decay, adding to the pressure of the big bang.

Although the mass of such a neutrino is small (17 keV compared with about 500 keV for an electron), neutrinos are thought to be so common in the Universe that they could have a profound influence on the way the Universe has evolved.