Through Neutrino Eyes

The importance of the neutrino has always been rather obvious.  Yet detection was the issue.  This reminds us that the work continues and will continue.  We will need to build detectors around the Earth that are also linked electronically to a very high level of precision in order to build resolution.

In fact it also gives us a great reason to establish a base on the moon.

All this will take a lot of time but the importance is obvious.

I am not sure what present day resolution looks like except to assume it is awful.  That we are resolving anything is good.

We actually need to devise a photonic device operating at the proper wavelength and able to interact with a passing neutrino if this is even possible.  I suspect it is.  We may inadvertently be already detecting neutrinos and not recognizing it. In that case and with that form of protocol, a lot of the structure of the universe could be revealed.

Through Neutrino Eyes: Ghostly Particles Become Astronomical Tools ( Preview )

Neutrinos are no longer just a curiosity of physics but a practical tool for astronomy

By Graciela B. Gelmini, Alexander Kusenko and Thomas J. Weiler   

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=through-neutrino-eyes&sc=DD_20100518

Key Concepts

·           Neutrinos will give astronomers a type of x-ray vision far better than actual x-rays. Being the most unreactive type of subatomic particle, they pass through intervening matter as though it were hardly there—revealing the cores of stars and other dramatic but otherwise hidden places in the cosmos.

·           Alas, the very property that makes neutrinos so useful means they tend to fly through detectors without registering. Only this year have instruments become sensitive enough to detect cosmic sources unequivocally.

·           Neutrinos come in multiple varieties and can metamorphose in midflight. This peculiar property provides additional information about their celestial origins.

When the Nobel Foundation awarded Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics, it could have chosen to emphasize any of their many accomplishments. Davis made his name detecting neutrinos from the sun—the first of these notoriously elusive particles ever seen from beyond our planet—and Koshiba discovered them coming from the great supernova explosion of 1987. Their work was an experimental tour de force and helped to establish that neutrinos, which theorists had assumed were massless, in fact have a small mass. Yet the Nobel Foundation recognized Davis and Koshiba, above all, for establishing a new branch of science: neutrino astronomy.

With their work, neutrinos graduated from a theoretical novelty to a practical way to probe the universe. In addition to studying neutrinos to glean the particles’ properties, scientists can now use them to lift the veil on some of the hidden mysteries of the universe. In an undertaking akin to the construction of giant optical telescopes a century ago, astronomers have been designing and building vast neutrino telescopes in anticipation of seeing new wonders. These observatories have already caught tens of thousands of neutrinos and made pictures of the sun in neutrinos. Neutrinos from other cosmic sources are hard to tell apart from those produced in Earth’s upper atmosphere, but instruments should be able to do so by this time next year.