At any give second , roughly 600 trillion neutrinos are be active through your body . We do n’t feel them , and we can barely discover them because they have no electric heraldic bearing and are fantastically clear . However , we do not know exactly how light they are .
We do not have a accurate value for the tidy sum of the neutrino , but we have estimate its upper limit point using a variety of sources . Some information comes from speck physic and some comes from what we know about the macrocosm . Now researchers have combined much of this entropy using a novel estimate technique and utilise a supercomputer to boil out an answer .
As reported inPhysical Review Letters , the team estimates the maximal possible mass of the lightest neutrino to be 1.5 x 10 - 37kilograms . That ’s over 10 million multiplication smaller than the mass of the electron . Like comparing a pea to an elephant . A truly tiny time value for the atom .
“ We used entropy from a variety of sources including space- and primer coat - based telescope observing the first light of the universe of discourse ( the cosmic microwave background radiation ) , exploding stars , the largest 3 - five hundred map of galaxies in the universe , speck throttle , nuclear reactor , and more , ” lead source Dr Arthur Loureiro , from University College London ( UCL ) , said in astatement .
“ As neutrino are abundant but tiny and elusive , we needed every objet d’art of knowledge available to calculate their mass and our method could be applied to other big query puzzling cosmologists and molecule physicists likewise . ”
Electrons and neutrino are leptons . lepton in the cosmos come in three types or flavors . There is the negatron , the muon , and the tau particle . Neutrinos too come in three flavors , electron neutrinos , mu-meson neutrinos , and tau neutrino , with the negatron neutrino being the faint . But neutrino have a particular power ; they can change their flavor .
Researchers have describe them as " flavor - queer",and they vibrate from one type to the next . This property is relevant to the question of the mass of neutrinos . The oscillation is only allow by the laws of natural philosophy if the neutrinos have different masses , so their masses can not all be zero , for model .
“ The three flavours can be compare to ice emollient where you have one pocket arrest strawberry , chocolate and vanilla . Three flavours are always present but in different ratios , and the change proportion – and the weird demeanour of the particle – can only be explained by neutrinos take a mass , ” explained Dr Loureiro .
The three flavors of neutrinos put together have a maximal total mass of less than 4.6310 - 37kilograms . These computation were performed using the UCL supercomputer Grace .
“ We used more than half a million compute hours to process the data point ; this is equivalent to almost 60 years on a unmarried C.P.U. . This project push the bound for big data analysis in cosmogony , ” 2d writer Andrei Cuceu , a PhD bookman at UCL , bring .
In the upcoming geezerhood , astronomical observation undertaking such as the Dark Energy Survey and the European Space Agency ’s Euclid will do more detailed cosmogonic measurement that could also help to refine the neutrino pot estimate .
