Every second collapses a massable star somewhere in the observable universe and solves a supernova explosion from . According to physicists, the Observatory Super-Kamiokande in Japan could now have a steady stream of neutrinos from these disasters Collect , which could amount to a few discoveries a year.

This Winy subatomar particle Crucial to understand what happens in a supernova: Since you shoot out of the collapse core of the star and fly through space, you can provide information about possibly new physics that could occur under extreme conditions.

on the last Neutrino 2024 Conference in Miland, Italy, Unproved Masayuki Harada, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, that the first indications of supernova-neutrinos apparently come from the chaos of particles that the super-Kamiokand detector collects every day from other sources, such as cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere, and the nuclear fusion in the sun. The result indicates that "we have started to observe a signal," says Masayuki Nakahata, a physicist at the University of Tokyo and spokesman for the experiment, which is commonly referred to as Super-K. However, Nakahata warns that the supportive data - collected over 956 days of observation - are still very weak.

fleeting particles

Neutrinos are extremely difficult to grasp. Most cross the planet like light through glass, and Super-K only captures a tiny fraction of those who cross it. Nevertheless, the detector has a good chance of capturing Neutrinos from Supernovae because the universe should be flooded with it. The collapse of a star releases tremendous amounts of these particles (estimated on about 10^58), which astrophysicists call the diffuse supernova-neutrino background.

So far, however, nobody has been able to demonstrate this background. Neutrinos were only Stern traces -Nakahata was one of the researchers who discovered the particles in 1987 with the Kamioka II detector, a predecessor of Super-K. The discovery was possible because the supernova took place in the large Magellan cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is close enough that the neutrinos of the exploding star reached the earth in large numbers.

In the years 2018-2020 the Super-K detector underwent a tank with 50,000 tons of cleaned water under one kilometer rock near Hida on the central island of Honshu, a simple but important upgrade, whose goal was to increase its ability to distinguish supernova neutrinos from other particles.

If a neutrino - more precisely its anti -particle, an antineutrino - collides with a proton in the water, this proton can convert into a few other particles, a neutron and an anti -electron. The anti -electron creates a flash of light while moving in the water at high speed, and this light is captured by the sensors that surround the walls of the tank. This flash of light alone could not be distinguished with the light generated by neutrinos or antineutrinos from a number of other sources.

During the upgrade, scientists Super-K water added a gadolinium-based salt. This enables neutron to be captured by the gadolinium core in the impact of an antineutrino on the water, which releases a second, characteristic energy sequence. Super-K physicists looking for Supernova-Neutrinos are looking for a quick row of two flashlights, one from the anti-electron and the second of the prisoner neutron.

cosmic mysteries solve

nakahata says that it will take several years for real supernova signals to emerge clearly, since double-flash signals can also come from other neutrino sources, including those caused by cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere. But until Super-K should close by 2029, he adds, should it have collected enough data to collect a solid claim.

an even greater experiment called Hyper-Kamiokande , which is expected to be completed around 2027, could massively improve the results of Super-K. First, Hyper-K will be filled with pure water, but "all components of the detector are designed to be compatible with gadolinium", which could later be added, says Francesca di Lodovico, a physicist at King’s College London and co-spokeswoman for the project.

to show that neutrinos of distant supernovae that took place in billions ago of years ago still existed, would confirm that neutrinos are stable particles and do not disintegrate into anything else, says Nakahata. This is something that physicists have long suspected, but have not been proven to prove.

The measurement of the entire spectrum of the energies of Supernova-Neutrinos could also provide information on how many supernovae have taken place on various epochs of cosmic history, says Harada. In addition, it could reveal how many collapsing stars resulted in a black hole - which would stop the emission of Neutrinos - in contrast to leave a neutron star back.

The data from Super-K are still too weak to claim a discovery, but the possibility of discovering the diffuse neutrinos is “extremely exciting,” says Ignacio Tabada, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and spokesman for the IceCube-Neutrino observatory at the South Pole. “Neutrinos would provide an independent measurement for the history of star formation in the universe.”