1/29/2024 0 Comments When you bust a neutrino![]() We offer an "Unlimited Returns Period" and endeavour to process all returns within 48 hours of receipt. If it's going fast enough, a feather can absolutely knock you over.We hope that you are perfectly happy with your order from Trekitt, but we understand that you may want to return your purchase. If you observed a supernova from 1 AU away-and you somehow avoided being being incinerated, vaporized, and converted to some type of exotic plasma-even the flood of ghostly neutrinos would be dense enough to kill you. The idea of neutrino radiation damage reinforces just how big supernovae are. \Ģ.3 AU is a little more than the distance between the Sun and Mars.Ĭore collapse supernovae happen to giant stars, so if you observed a supernova from that distance, you'd probably be inside the outer layers of the star that created it. Using the inverse-square law, we can calculate the radiation dose: radiationĪ fatal radiation dose is about 4 sieverts. would be around half a nanosievert, or 1/500th the dose from eating a banana. Karam calculates that the neutrino radiation dose at a distance of one parsec 3.262 light-years, or a little less than the distance from here to Alpha Centauri. It explains that during certain supernovae, the collapse of a stellar core into a neutron star, 10 57 neutrinos can be released (one for every proton in the star that collapses to become a neutron). " Gamma And Neutrino Radiation Dose From Gamma Ray Bursts And Nearby Supernovae." Health Physics 82, no. At what point do these two unimaginable things cancel out to produce an effect on a human scale?Ī paper by radiation expert Andrew Karam provides an answer. That's why this is a neat question supernovae are unimaginably huge and neutrinos are unimaginably insubstantial. The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?Īpplying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:Ī supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or Here's a question to give you a sense of scale: The physicist who mentioned this problem to me told me his rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that. Similarly, it's so hard to get enough neutrinos to compel even a single one of them to interact with matter, making it hard to picture a scenario in which there'd be enough of them to affect you. It looks like it should be "1" or something, but it's not. If you want to be mean to first-year calculus students, you can ask them to take the derivative of ln(x) e dx. If you have a math background, it's sort of like seeing the expression "ln(x) e"-it's not that, taken literally, it doesn't make sense, but it's hard to imagine a situation where it would apply. Which would still be less than 1% of the ants in the world. It's like the idiom "knock me over with a feather" or the phrase "football stadium filled to the brim with ants". That's why the phrase "lethal dose of neutrino radiation" sounds weird-it mixes scales in an incongruous way. This means that when a particle accelerator (which produces neutrinos) wants to send a neutrino beam to a detector somewhere else in the world, all it has to do is point the beam at the detector-even if it's on the other side of the Earth! To detect neutrinos, people build giant tanks filled with hundreds of tons of material in the hopes that they'll register the impact of a single solar neutrino. In fact, neutrinos are so shadowy that the entire Earth is transparent to them nearly all of the Sun's neutrino flood goes straight through it unaffected. Statistically, my first neutrino interaction probably happened somewhere around age 10. Less often if you're a child, since you have fewer atoms to be hit. On average, out of that massive flood, only one neutrino will "hit" an atom in your body every few years. The reason you don't notice the neutrino flood is that neutrinos hardly interact with ordinary matter at all. Look at your hand-there are about a trillion neutrinos from the Sun passing through it every second. Neutrinos are ghostly particles that barely interact with the world at all. If you're not a physics person, it might not sound odd to you, so here's a little context for why it's such a surprising idea: I had to turn it over in my head a few times after I heard it. The phrase "lethal dose of neutrino radiation" is a weird one. How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation? What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is out! Order here! ◀︎ ▶︎ Lethal Neutrinos
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