In the universe, neutrinos are often found subatomic particles. They rarely interact with other things and can pass through anything. Therefore, it is highly challenging to detect neutrinos (subatomic particles are particles many times smaller than atoms).

The researchers claim that neutrinos are crucial to understanding the nature of large bangs in space, the stellar and black hole physics, the standard model of particle physics, as well as cosmology.

Neutrinos are extraordinarily tiny subatomic particles, also called “ghost particles,” that can traverse both the Earth and the human body. About 100 trillion trillion neutrinos harmlessly pass through the human body every second.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was utilized by researchers from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland to study the mass of neutrinos.

The aforementioned experiment demonstrated how neutrinos are identical to electrons but lack a charge and have a mass so close to zero that some researchers have hypothesized that neutrinos may not even have mass.

The first neutrinos were discovered in 1955 by a team led by physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the largest multidisciplinary research facility in the US.

At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a nuclear reactor produces neutrinos by beta decay.

In 1965, a gold mine in eastern South Africa hosted an experiment that led to the discovery of the first “natural” neutrino.

Neutrinos weren’t actually of interest until they were found in the renowned Homestake mine, though.

Formerly the biggest gold mine in the US, the Homestake mine is located in South Dakota. John Bahcall and Ray Davis, Jr., two physicists, constructed a lab 1,478 meters below in this mine and found neutrinos flowing from the Sun’s core.

These findings have also been validated by several later neutrino detectors, including Super Kamiokande in Japan.

The finding was recognized with the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics by physicists Bahcall and Davis.

Neutrinos are produced in fusion processes in the Sun and nuclear reactors on Earth, according to experiments.

However, neutrinos are also “made” in locations that are far further away. A star experienced a visible supernova explosion in February 1987. However, an outburst of neutrinos from the dying star was discovered 2-3 hours before the supernova’s visible light reached us. It has never happened before for neutrinos to originate from a supernova.

Since then, neutrinos from activities near active supermassive black holes have also been discovered.

Since primordial neutrinos, which arise in the first second after the big bang, are also quite prevalent in the cosmos, neutrinos are also relevant to cosmology.

Scientists intend to construct a neutrino laboratory in the Pacific Ocean in the future. This massive neutrino detector will be at least 3.2 km deep.

One of the best-kept secrets of the cosmos is neutrinos, and we are just now starting to understand some of their complexities.