geoneutrino

That made it well suited to see the even rarer appearance of a geoneutrino or two.

PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010

Princeton University proclaimed this month that some of its physicists had helped discover an invisible particle known as a geoneutrino.

PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010

A geoneutrino is, it turns out, a particularly elusive type of an already elusive class of particles -- neutrinos -- most famous for inspiring John Updike to write a poem with the lines: "The earth is just a silly ball/To them, through which they simply pass."

PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010

Drexel physicist Charles Lane, who worked on the 2005 geoneutrino detection, said the important thing was that science had finally offered concrete proof of a pivotal theory proposed more than 100 years ago by Ernest Rutherford, famous for discovering the atomic nucleus.

PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010

Others have suggested that geoneutrino detectors could be used to track how much plutonium is being burned in nuclear reactors -- thereby perhaps monitoring illicit activity.

PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010

Both of the current experiments claiming geoneutrino discoveries were originally built for other reasons.

PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010

To get a better idea of what's going on in the mantle - a dim and more distant flashlight - requires a geoneutrino detector situated in a place where the crust is only a few kilometers thick, like at the bottom of the ocean.

Science News / Features, Blog Entries, Column Entries, Issues, News Items and Book Reviews 2009

That's expensive, but it's about a factor of 10 less expensive than sending a spacecraft to another planet, points out David Stevenson, a planetary physicist at the California Institute of Technology in, who is not directly involved in the geoneutrino experiments.

Science News / Features, Blog Entries, Column Entries, Issues, News Items and Book Reviews 2009

Stevenson points out that all the geoneutrino detectors proposed share a shortcoming: They can't detect the geoneutrinos coming from radioactive potassium-40.

Science News / Features, Blog Entries, Column Entries, Issues, News Items and Book Reviews 2009

For all their promise, these geoneutrino detectors won't be able to unearth the whole picture of Earth's interior.

Science News / Features, Blog Entries, Column Entries, Issues, News Items and Book Reviews 2009