Neutrinos – The Ghost Particles

Right now, a hundred trillion particles from the Sun are passing through your body every second, and you'll never feel one. This episode traces the neutrino from Wolfgang Pauli's reluctant 1930 prediction, through its first detection near a nuclear reactor, to the decades-long solar neutrino problem and its resolution through neutrino oscillation, the supernova that let neutrino detectors beat light to the punch, and the giant ice-bound telescope now using neutrinos to study the most violent events in the universe. You'll come away understanding why Pauli proposed neutrinos to rescue energy conservation, why these particles interact with matter so rarely, why detecting them demands enormous underground and under-ice observatories, what the solar neutrino problem was and how neutrino oscillation solved it, what Supernova 1987A revealed, and how IceCube is opening up neutrino astronomy. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: CERN – public explainers on neutrinos and the weak force; IceCube Neutrino Observatory – public science pages; Nobel Prize organisation – background on the 2015 physics prize for neutrino oscillation; Scientific American – features on solar neutrinos and Supernova 1987A.