A mission concept to fly a solar neutrino detector close to the sun

This is one of the new images of the Sun from ESA’s Solar Orbiter’s closest approach on March 26, 2022. Credit: ESA

Astronomers have proposed a concept mission to fly a neutrino observatory into orbit around the sun to get a better picture of what’s going on in the sun’s core.

Astronomers have very few tools to peer into the heart of the sun. Fortunately, the constant nuclear reactions taking place in the sun’s core as hydrogen combine to form helium release a relentless flood of neutrinos. Neutrinos are tiny, ghost-like particles that almost never interact with matter.

On Earth we’ve built giant detectors to catch the occasional neutrino. Astronomers have used these neutrinos to understand the nuclear processes taking place inside the sun and to probe the edges of known physics.

But our observatories on Earth are basically limited because our planet is so far from the sun. So what if we took the neutrino observatory into space?

A team of astronomers has proposed a concept mission to do this. The main advantage of placing a neutrino observatory in space is its ability to get up close and personal with the sun itself. If we flew the observatory at the same distance as the Parker Solar Probe, it would find more than a thousand times more neutrinos than the same detector on Earth. Getting closer to the sun can increase that number by more than 10,000 times.

Such a neutrino flux would provide an unparalleled view into the nuclear processes of the nucleus. And by orbiting around the sun, the spacecraft would gain another advantage by looking for asymmetry or differences in the sun’s neutrino output, which would be clues to dark matter or other exotic processes.

Spacecraft don’t even need to get close to the sun to take advantage of all that space has to offer. The sun’s gravity bends the path of light, and the light converges at a focal point hundreds of AU away. The trajectories of neutrinos also bend around the sun, but because they have mass, their focal point is only 20-40 AU apart. Placing a neutrino observatory there would allow astronomers to use the sun as a magnifying lens to study the origin of neutrinos emanating from the center of the galaxy and beyond.

On the downside, a neutrino observatory in space would need a thick protective layer to block out cosmic rays in other high-energy particles that can mimic neutrino signals. Putting that much weight into space would certainly be a challenge.

At the moment the mission is just a concept, but if successful, it could provide a new platform for understanding not only these tiny particles but the physics of the sun itself.

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Researchers test a key neutrino model at the Large Hadron Collider

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Provided by Universe Today

Quote: Mission concept to fly a solar neutrino detector close to the sun (2022, 19 July) retrieved 20 July 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-07-mission-concept-solar-neutrino-detector.html

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