It is also the second most fundamental particles that make up the universe, after photons. Neutrinos come in three different flavors: electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. These neutral charged particles were first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain how beta decays conserve energy; he called these particles “neutron”. In 1931, an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, renamed the term neutron “neutrinos”, which means small and neutral in Italian. The majority of neutrinos in the galaxy are known to be appeared around 15 billion years ago, and they can be found everywhere in the galaxy. There are trillions of neutrinos floating through our bodies every second. Aside from radioactive decays, other neutrinos are also being produced from nuclear power station, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, and also during the births and deaths of stars. Because neutrinos move nearly as fast as the speed of light and its weak interactions with matter, early experiments could not calculate the mass of neutrinos accurately. For several years, detecting and calculating the mass of neutrinos was a struggle for many scientists, and the Standard Model of Physics had predicted that neutrinos were massless. However, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald’s discoveries resolved this mystery that helped them win the Nobel Prize. Their discovery is known to change “our understanding of
It is also the second most fundamental particles that make up the universe, after photons. Neutrinos come in three different flavors: electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. These neutral charged particles were first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain how beta decays conserve energy; he called these particles “neutron”. In 1931, an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, renamed the term neutron “neutrinos”, which means small and neutral in Italian. The majority of neutrinos in the galaxy are known to be appeared around 15 billion years ago, and they can be found everywhere in the galaxy. There are trillions of neutrinos floating through our bodies every second. Aside from radioactive decays, other neutrinos are also being produced from nuclear power station, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, and also during the births and deaths of stars. Because neutrinos move nearly as fast as the speed of light and its weak interactions with matter, early experiments could not calculate the mass of neutrinos accurately. For several years, detecting and calculating the mass of neutrinos was a struggle for many scientists, and the Standard Model of Physics had predicted that neutrinos were massless. However, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald’s discoveries resolved this mystery that helped them win the Nobel Prize. Their discovery is known to change “our understanding of