Posted on 11/04/2010 12:31:54 PM PDT by lbryce
Today physicists announced that they may have found the key to explaining dark matter in the universe. It all has to do with the potential discovery of a "sterile neutrino."
According to a release about the new study:
Neutrinos are neutral elementary particles born in the radioactive decay of other particles. The known "flavors" of neutrinos are the neutral counterparts of electrons and their heavier cousins, muons and taus. Regardless of a neutrino's original flavor, the particles constantly flip from one type to another in a phenomenon called "neutrino flavor oscillation."
An electron neutrino might become a muon neutrino, and then later an electron neutrino again. Scientists previously believed three flavors of neutrino exist. In this Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment, dubbed MiniBooNE, researchers detected more oscillations than would be possible if there were only three flavors.
"These results imply that there are either new particles or forces we had not previously imagined," said Byron Roe, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics, and an author of a paper on the results newly published online in Physical Review Letters.
"The simplest explanation involves adding new neutrino-like particles, or sterile neutrinos, which do not have the normal weak interactions."
The three known types of neutrino interact with matter primarily through the weak nuclear force, which makes them difficult to detect. It is hypothesized that this fourth flavor would not interact through the weak force, making it even harder to find.
The existence of sterile neutrinos could help explain the composition of the universe, said William Louis, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was a doctoral student of Roe's at U-M and is involved in the MiniBooNE experiment.
(Excerpt) Read more at io9.com ...
neutrino? Isn’t that a wild rodent in Florida? Or a Italian cookie, a figaro neutrino?
Of course Einstein was wrong ~ God does play dice with the universe, particularly when He throws them where He can't see them.
But, we digress. They've found something they think they might could understand someday so they've proposed a theory ~ yet another neutrino. Maybe it's a buttino, and it's hot, and cold, at the same time!
I thought we were done with Helen Thomas threads.
I see a screen name but I see no evidence of you...
You must have missed the thread re; scientists
(used loosely) who posited that one day - time will cease.
They failed to state unequivocally which day that would be:
Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.
I know;)
I hope that was satire. lol.
Every new discovery seems to throw their old theories out the window. lol.
"What do you get if you multiply six by nine"?
"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe."
You are obviously a student of the ‘string cheese’ theory;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory
Things were so simple then.
Yep, and the pay was a lot less. I wonder how much these guys make. Anyway, I liked the simple life.
how does one know it’s a new flavor if one can’t taste it?
” Every new discovery seems to throw their old theories out the window. lol. “
That’s what ‘theories’ and ‘hypotheses’ are supposed to be for - to test against reality, to be proven, changed, or scrapped as the data indicate...
NOT to be defended with doctored data, so they can be used to justify policies which will bankrupt nations.....
It isn't really a violation of anything until Congress says it is............give them time and they probably will.
Yeah; It’s like the scientists who’ve claimed to have invented a device that stops time but haven’t decided on the duration in which to test it out.
There are plenty of asymmetries in Physics: for instance - there’s an asymmetry that causes there to be more matter than antimatter.
Asymmetries are not signs of sloppy work: they’re merely what they are: asymmetries .
Your house, your body, your dog, your planet, the night sky - all of these are either subtly or obviously asymmetric, and yet all of them are good. The subatomic world is equally asymmetric - and it works beautifully.
God is an perfectionist, and makes all things better than we can know.
Ow, my head hurts.
If the universe existed in perfect symmetry, we'd have a universe full of gamma rays and nothing else. It's the asymmetry that gave rise to matter.
And for what it's worth, I always considered "dark matter" to be the astrophysicists' equivalent of "dragons" on old world maps. Might as well say "The Force Formerly Known As Prince".
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