Draw a one centimetre square on your finger & hold it towards the Sun πŸ‘†

Now consider that some 60 billion neutrinos hit it every second, created by nuclear fusion in the solar core 500 seconds ago πŸ™€

Even if it’s nighttime & your finger has to point down through Earth’s surface – they don’t care πŸ™ƒ

But if it makes you feel better, there are only about 2 solar neutrinos in each cubic centimetre of you at any given instant πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

Well, plus another 300 from the Big Bang 😬

#Astrodon #BigNumberology

@markmccaughrean sure, but so far they've proven completely useless.

@FirefighterGeek I dunno – showing that they oscillate between types & thus have mass has given the Standard Model a bit of a shake-up, & won Kajita & McDonald a fair wallop of cash along with the 2015 Physics Nobel Prize.

But arguably the whole point of neutrinos is to make us feel useless & insignificant as they stream through us without a care in the universe. I'd say we need a bit more of that in our lives πŸ™‚

@markmccaughrean Until I can use them to cook popcorn, they're dead to me.

-> This is the serious me acknowledging your point and the value of pure science, it's just not as funny <-

@FirefighterGeek It's the neutrinos that are laughing – almost every one of them will live forever, long after we & our popcorn have become dust blown in the wind of our dying Sun.

-> Momentary seriousness acknowledged in return <-

@markmccaughrean Their laughter is easy to ignore since they are barely capable of interacting with anything. ;-)

@FirefighterGeek @markmccaughrean

They most definitely are not useless. Supernovae are always preceded by a neutrino burst several minutes to hours before other emissions of the supernova become visible to us, giving us precious time to train a whole bunch of telescopes on that region of sky to catch it as it happens.

@FirefighterGeek @atatassault Not true, unfortunately. The only supernova to have been detected in neutrinos was SN1987A & that was only noticed in the data well after the optical emission had been spotted.