Neutrinos

When we think about what the universe is made of, most of us imagine atoms, matter we can touch, see, or feel.

But peel back the layers of reality and the truth is far simpler and far stranger.

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that make up everything.

There are only 17 particles in what we call the standard model of particle physics.

Only 17 building blocks construct everything in existence: every star, every planet, every human.

And three of those are neutrinos.

It's kind of amazing that we can know that, and that's what nature tells us.

That's how the world is constructed.

Meet Mike Hefner, a particle physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

He studies neutrinos, exploring the mysteries of their weakly interacting and abundant nature.

The sun, it's some 90 million miles away or something like this.

It's emitting so many neutrinos right now that there's a trillion per second going straight through you, and you don't sense them because they just go straight through.

They go through the Earth and come out the other side.

The neutrino seldom interacts with anything, slipping through our universe without a trace.

That's one of the most distinguishing features of a neutrino compared to the other particles.

If you were to try to shield yourself from a neutrino, it would take one light year of lead to stop it.

So that's how weakly interacting they are.

They just basically pass through everything.

It passes straight through rock, metal, and the instruments built to catch it, forcing us to wait for the brief, rare flash that says a neutrino finally brushed against something.

When we think about what the universe is made of, most of us imagine atoms, matter we can touch, see, or feel.

But peel back the layers of reality and the truth is far simpler and far stranger.

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that make up everything.

There are only 17 particles in what we call the standard model of particle physics.

Only 17 building blocks construct everything in existence: every star, every planet, every human.

And three of those are neutrinos.

It's kind of amazing that we can know that, and that's what nature tells us.

That's how the world is constructed.

Meet Mike Hefner, a particle physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

He studies neutrinos, exploring the mysteries of their weakly interacting and abundant nature.

The sun, it's some 90 million miles away or something like this.

It's emitting so many neutrinos right now that there's a trillion per second going straight through you, and you don't sense them because they just go straight through.

They go through the Earth and come out the other side.

The neutrino seldom interacts with anything, slipping through our universe without a trace.

That's one of the most distinguishing features of a neutrino compared to the other particles.

If you were to try to shield yourself from a neutrino, it would take one light year of lead to stop it.

So that's how weakly interacting they are.

They just basically pass through everything.

It passes straight through rock, metal, and the instruments built to catch it, forcing us to wait for the brief, rare flash that says a neutrino finally brushed against something.