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 ...
That banana splits take precedence over posting articles of the sort you take such pride in having avoided, reveling in having made the right decision is conventional wisdom and not at all revealing or post-worthy to some of us.
Hmm, rather sounds like Kepler playing with spheres.
People can every great once in a while make 2x2=5. For dogs, trees, and rocks 2x2 always equals 4. That is why humans are ultimately superior to rocks.
Are neutrino flavors covered in the New Testament or the Old Testament? Or was that the Upanishads?
I only wish it were true...
Even political religions, like Communism?
Can I be the first to propose that there may be, in fact, 31 flavors of neutrinos?
The article was very scientific because it had a lot of “maybes” and “perhaps” and “could bes” and “mights” in it.
Weird stuff that I don’t understand, but still like to read about it - reminder to read later.
Thanks.
io9.com seems to be going through a “boo-hoo” Republicans won phase which I hope they get through because I usually like them.
By their own words shall they be known.
By the statement quoted above, the scientist who spoke those words demonstrated that the supreme intellectual element of so many scientists today is ARROGANCE.
One of the greatest truths about human science, and most particularly about physics, is that each major advance that was achieved in trying to solve a major question, while answering that question as best as we were able to answer it, opened a window on the whole subject to reveal we had gained many more questions than we knew to ask before we found our solution.
We will never with our puny brains and human imperfections completely understand "all the matter we haven't yet discovered" because at every step of the way we will always find there are elements of "matter" deeper, more complex, more unimaginable than we either knew to look or even guessed at. The "cosmic egg" will be forever unfolding to us, never "solved" in any final sense.
***And we may be a few steps closer to understanding all the matter we haven’t yet discovered, and have therefore labeled “dark.” ****
Does it matter? Jessie and Al got upset over the Black Holes in space! Won’t they see something evil in the word “Dark Matter”?
Especially if it’s tutti frutti.
Good question. The way it works is by that "relativity" phenomenon. You know about how a train coming toward you has a higher pitched horn than the same train going away from you. (Doppler effect) That's what happens to light traveling from a star that has motion relative to the earth. All radiant energy from infrared to gamma travels at the speed of light. If a star is coming toward you at, say, half the speed of light, the light it emits would arrive at 1.5 times the speed of light, right? No, it cannot go any faster. What happens is the frequency shifts upwards. Yellow light becomes blue, for instance. The red shift used to measure distance assumes that the spectrum of a certain type (size) of star is the same no matter where it is. By knowing what size the star is, one could calculate how far away it is and how it is moving relative to earth. Cosmological red shift assumes that the big bang has accelerated everthing outwards and that the farther away it is, the faster it is receding away from us. It happened about 8.5 billion years ago and shows no sign of ever ending. WIKI has a fair explanation. It is theoretically impossible for any object having any mass whatsoever to be moving at the speed of light.
IMHO, nothing is the matter. It's all in their collective empty heads.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
