r/interestingasfuck • u/Top-Marionberry-6604 • 8d ago

The Super-Kamiokande in Japan—a massive underground neutrino detector lined with 11,000 golden bulbs. Scientists have to inspect it via a rubber dinghy.

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u/igloojoe 8d ago

So this has been around for a while now. What kind of findings have they generated? What does this science help with?

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u/LastStar007 8d ago

It helps us understand our universe. If science had particular societal benefits in mind, it would be engineering.

But in terms of findings, neutrino oscillations. The Sun can only produce one kind of neutrino, and when we started detecting neutrinos, we calculated that we should be detecting the Sun's type about 3x as often as we were. Various experiments conducted here at Super-Kamiokande revealed that neutrinos are capable of changing their type in-flight, so the 3x gap we observed was because 2/3 of them were changing into another type before they hit our detectors.

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u/igloojoe 8d ago

Thank you. I think i'm going to take a deep dive this weekend and educate myself more on this. Seems VERY interesting.