Neutrino – The Ghostly Particle

Neutrinos are ghostly particles. They can change their identities. They have mass of about one-millionth of the mass of electron. Also, they are neutral and interact only via the nuclear weak force and gravity.

Think of this, if we take the strength of nuclear strong force as 1, electromagnetism’s strength is 10^-2, nuclear weak force’s strength is 10^-13 while gravity’s strength is 10^-38.

Even though gravity dominats at the massive scale like planets, stars, galaxies, clusters, etc it acts like it is not there at the molecular level. So, for the neutrino, even though it interests with gravity, we cannot make use of it as it is extremely weak. Now, the only choice left is nuclear weak force but it is 10^-13 times weaker than nuclear strong force.

So, neutrons can almost penetrate through everything without any problem. Just think of this, 650 trillion neutrinos are passing you every second. And if you ever want to make a neutrino shield and you put a shield made of lead from our sun to Alpha Centauri only 50% of the neutrinos will be blocked but other 50% will pass through as if there is no shield.

Therefore, it is almost impossible to block neutrinos. Every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos pass through Earth without any interaction except for some high energy neutrinos. And this one is gonna blow your mind, the sun produces about 10^38 neutrinos every second but we can only detect only a minimal amount of this. To give how minimal this amount is, look at this. Scientists detected 19 neutrinos from an explosion of a star inside the Large Magellanic Cloud – only 19 out of the octo-decillion (10⁵⁷) neutrinos emitted by the supernova.

So, truly neutrinos are ghostly particles. Lastly, neutrinos are of three varieties – electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino. Their mass increases in ascending order from electron neutrino to tau neutrino.

They are like natures thieves and can change their identities like electron neutrino turning to muon neutrino or tau neutrino and vice-versa. They can even borrow energy from vacuum. As promised, I will explain this process in an upcoming blog.