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In a world first, researchers from the Borexino project (started in 1990) revealed that they had made the first detection of particles called neutrinos that can be traced back to the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) fusion inside the Sun. which date back to the 1930s.
Scientists have long assumed that the CNO cycle is the main type of fusion in the universe. However, in our relatively cold sun (cold compared to other stars) this cycle represents only 1% of its energy, making it difficult to spot.
When the discovery was made, the world-famous Borexino detector was looking for extremely difficult to detect neutrinos emitted during nuclear fusion in the core of our sun. It had taken the instrument decades to measure neutrinos from the sun’s proton-proton chain reaction.
A difficult challenge
However, identifying CNO neutrinos had been a real challenge as only about seven were identified each day. This is why their discovery has now been hailed as one of the greatest physics discoveries of the new millennium.
“It’s really a breakthrough for solar and stellar physics,” he said NBC News Gioacchino Ranucci of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), one of the researchers of the project. “This is the first proof that the CNO cycle is at work under the sun and the stars.”
The discovery, according to other experts, can be used to investigate previously unattainable regions of the universe. Gabriel Orebi Gann, a particle physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research, said NBC News the job is “an important milestone”.
“This discovery takes us one step closer to understanding the composition of our sun’s core and the formation of heavy stars,” he added. Orebi Gann also added that the new research could also be used to explain the scarcity of antimatter in our universe. This means that we may finally be on the verge of understanding why and how the Universe exists. Talk about a discovery!
The study was published Wednesday in the magazine Nature.
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