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Two New Windows on the Universe
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Two New Windows on the Universe
Why does the Sun shine?
In the 19th century there were lively discussions about the source of the Sun's energy. One theory was that this solar reaction was due to the release of gravitational energy when the Sun's material contracted. However, in this case, the calculated life expectancy of the Sun was, in our eyes, short. It was approximately 20 million years, compared with the age of the Earth, which we know today is approximately 5 billion years.
In 1920, an experiment showed that a helium atom has less mass than four hydrogen atoms. The British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington realised that nuclear reactions in which hydrogen was transformed into helium might be the basis of the Sun's energy supply, using Albert Einstein's formula E=m·c2. The transformation of hydrogen into helium in the Sun gives rise to two neutrinos for each helium nucleus that is formed by a series of reactions (explained by, among others, the Nobel Prize Laureate Hans Bethe). The dream of verifying this theory by detecting neutrinos was considered a practical impossibility by most scientists. However, in the 1950 s the Nobel Prize Laureate Frederick Reines and his colleagues succeeded in showing that it was possible to prove the existence of neutrinos. In their experiment they used the reactions in a nuclear reactor, which generates a large flux of neutrinos.
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| Fig. 1. Davis's detector, which for the first time in history proved the existence of solar neutrinos. The tank, which was placed in a gold mine, contained more than 600 tonnes of tetrachloroethylene and was 14. 6 metres long, with a diameter of 6. 1 metres |
The flux of neutrinos from the Sun was estimated to be very large: thousands of billions of solar neutrinos were reckoned to pass through our bodies every second without our noticing them. The reason is that these neutrinos react very weakly with matter, and only one of 1, 000 billion solar neutrinos would be stopped on its way through the Earth.
In the late 1950 s Raymond Davis Jr was the only scientist who dared to try to prove the existence of solar neutrinos, despite these poor odds. While most reactions in the Sun create neutrinos with energies so low that they are very difficult to detect, one rare reaction creates a high-energy neutrino. The Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo proposed that it ought to be possible to detect this neutrino after it had reacted with a nucleus of chlorine, forming a nucleus of argon and an electron. This argon nucleus is radioactive and has a life of about 50 days.
Particles captured in mines
In the 1960s Davis placed a tank filled with 615 tonnes of the common cleaning fluid tetrachloroethylene (Fig. 1) in a gold mine in South Dakota, USA. Altogether there were some 2·1030 chlorine atoms in the tank. He calculated that every month approximately 20 neutrinos ought to react with the chlorine, or in other words that 20 argon atoms ought to be created. Davis's pioneering approach was the development of a method for extracting these argon atoms and measuring their number. He released helium gas through the chlorine fluid and the argon atoms attached themselves to it — an achievement considerably more difficult than finding a particular grain of sand in the whole of the Sahara desert!
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This experiment gathered data until 1994 and all in all approximately 2, 000 argon atoms were extracted. However, this was fewer than expected. By means of control experiments Davis was able to show that no argon atoms were left in the tank of chlorine, so it seemed as though our understanding of these processes in the Sun was incomplete or that some of the neutrinos had disappeared on their way to the Earth.
Neutrinos from space
While Davis's experiment was running, the Japanese physicist Masatoshi Koshiba and his team constructed another detector, which was given the name Kamiokande. It was placed in a mine in Japan and consisted of an enormous tank filled with water. When neutrinos pass through this tank, they may interact with atomic nuclei in the water. This reaction leads to the release of an electron, creating small flashes of light. The tank was surrounded by photomultipliers that can capture these flashes. By adjusting the sensitivity of the detectors the presence of neutrinos could be proved and Davis's result was confirmed. Decisive differences between Davis's and Koshiba's experiments were that the latter registered the time for events and was sensitive to direction. It was therefore possible for the first time to prove that neutrinos come from the Sun (Fig. 2).
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| Fig. 2. Solar-neutrino observations in the Kamiokande experiment. A clear peak is visible at the angle corresponding to the direction of the Sun. The flat background comes from cosmic radiation and radioactivity around the detector. b) Observation of the burst of neutrinos from SN1987A. This figure shows the number of photomultipliers hit in a 17-minute interval beginning at 07. 33 UT. The burst of neutrinos came at 07. 35. 35 UT on 23 February, 1987 |
The Kamiokande detector was hit in February 1987 by a burst of neutrinos from a supernova explosion, named 1987A, in a neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud. This lies at about 170, 000 light years from the Earth (one light year corresponds to 1016 metres). If a neutron star is formed when a supernova explosion takes place, most of the enormous amount of energy released will be emitted as neutrinos. A total of about 1058 neutrinos is estimated to have been emitted from supernova 1987A, of which Koshiba's research group observed twelve of the approximately 1016 that passed through the detector. A similar experiment in the United States confirmed this discovery.
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