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Buried deep in the Apennines, the INFN laboratory is the largest underground research center in the world.
The rare emissions – which traveled 90 million miles to reach us – are produced in some nuclear reactions that account for less than one percent of solar energy.
A worldwide team of about 100 Borexino Collaboration scientists, including particle physicist Andrea Pocar of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, reports in Nature this week the detection of neutrinos from the sun, directly revealing for the first time that carbon-nitrogen- oxygen (CNO) the fusion cycle is at work under our sun. At the same time, although the CNO cycle plays a minor role in our Sun, it is most likely the predominant way of producing energy in other more massive and hotter stars.
Almost all stars, including our sun, emit enormous amounts of energy by fusing hydrogen into helium – an effective way to “burn” hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element and the main fuel source in the universe. Their lack of interaction also makes these subatomic particles difficult to detect. This not only states that CNO is a major thrust behind the larger stars, but the universe in the wild.
Neutrinos are neutral, subatomic, “spectral” particles with a mass close to zero.
These are nearly massless and are able to pass through ordinary matter without giving up any indication of their presence.
Physicists wanted to study these emissions from the Sun, however, as a better understanding of how the CNO cycle works in our star will offer insight into how larger stars – where this process is dominant – burn their nuclear fuel.
But after zooming in on the Borexino detector (which was already huge) and improving its sensitivity, physicists were able to detect seven neutrinos with the energy characteristic of the CNO cycle.
More than 100 scientists gathered in the Borexino detector on the Italian border to measure the nuclear fusion that occurs in the Sun’s core.
Most existing stars are much larger than our modest yellow sun: Betelgeuse, a red giant star, is about 20 times as massive and about 700 times the diameter of the sun.
These are detected by camera-like sensors and analyzed by powerful hardware.
While the Borexino Collaboration has been able to detect neutrinos originating from several reactions along the pp chain in recent years, their current result has been to explicitly identify neutrinos released in the CNO cycle, which are significantly less abundant in comparison.
According to the physicist Gioacchino Ranucci, also from Milan, the success of the experiment must be attributed to the “unprecedented purity” of the solution.
Furthermore, the scientists suggest in their article in the journal Nature, it might also be possible to refine the neutrino measurements enough to be able to calculate the amount of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in our Sun’s core – a direct experimental measure of what astrophysicists call its metallicity (its content of elements). heavier than hydrogen and helium).
The study showed how our star performs a process called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) fusion cycle, which uses heavier elements than scientists thought a star the size of the sun would do.
Confirming this from Earth, however, requires looking at the neutrinos each produces as a byproduct and distinguishing those in the CNO cycle from those in the pp process – a decades-long challenge. Basically, this confirms that the CNO cycle exists on an empirical basis – a task left unfinished since the process was first speculated in the 1930s, Futurism reports.
“It is the culmination of a tireless and years-long effort that has led us to push technology beyond what was previously achieved,” said Marco Pallavicini, spokesman for the Burexino experiment, physicist at the University of Genoa.
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