Popular Science: We still don't really know what's inside the sun—but that could change very soon
When the sun warms your face, it’s shooting more than just sunbeams at your skin. Neutrinos—ghostly particles with just a trace of mass—come along for the ride. Many trillions of them enter your body each second and carry right on into the ground, whizzing through the planet at nearly the speed of light.
Scientists have spent years scrutinizing this barrage of neutrinos, trying to understand precisely how the sun makes and launches them. While 99 percent of the sun’s energy comes from one type of fusion, the remaining one percent has long been thought to come from a second, more complicated reaction. And after decades of experimental wizardry, physicists have detected the neutrinos coming from this rarer reaction for the first time.
“This represents a smoking gun,” says Marc Pinsonneault, an astronomer at The Ohio State University who was not involved. It’s “a really beautiful confirmation of a very deep theoretical prediction.”
