By its “oscillations” (no stripper jokes, please).
sorry for the bad joke
this uneducated mind, who’s physics intel is limited to info learned some 40 years ago prior to ‘quarks’, is trying to understand, so, I went to the io9 article ‘The Undiscovered Particles on the Edge of Known Physics’, where I read, “sterile neutrinos... are nearly identical to neutrinos except they only interact through gravity”
in io9’s ‘The Ultimate Field Guide to Subatomic Particles” neutrinos are described as decayed neutrons, or “electron anti-neutrino”
So, are the physicists saying that it is interaction with the gravity of the SN that causes nutrinos to change to the (heavier) muons and taus, and loss of interaction that causes a reversal back to a (lighter) nutrino at a rate faster than expected? or is it the interaction with an ‘anti’ substance that changes a muon back to a nutrino? and, finally, how can an ‘anti’ be ‘serile’(neutral) ?