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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byAnonymous Coward writes:
What will it be in joules, 1 peta electronVolt?
Could I boil a kettle on this neutrino (potentially)?
byclick2005 ( 921437 ) * writes:
FTA:
Out of the countless detections it’s seen, two of them—nicknamed, seriously, Bert and Ernie—were phenomenally, unbelievably energetic: Each had an energy over one thousand trillion times the energy of a visible light photon. That’s huge, far larger energies than even the Large Hadron Collider can create. It’s very roughly equivalent to the energy of a raindrop hitting you on the head which may not sound like much, but remember we’re taking about a single subatomic par
bydimeglio ( 456244 ) writes:
Interesting. So if one of these neutrinos hits me, will I feel it? I understand due to electroweak unification (of these very high energy neutrinos) it will cause interaction with our body.
byspectrokid ( 660550 ) writes:
The neutrino is going to go straight through you with a 99.99999% probability. But if it does stop inside your body and deliver its energy, it should give of one hell of a whack. Wonder if you would be able to feel that?
byRoger W Moore ( 538166 ) writes:
The neutrino is going to go straight through you with a 99.99999% probability.
Actually that is probably not quite true. For the vast majority of neutrinos you encounter on a daily basis (from radioactive decay, relic Big Bang neutrinos, solar etc.) you are completely correct. Indeed for these, as the article states, they will pass through the earth without blinking.
However PeV neutrinos are NOT your everyday neutrino. These guys have such an incredible energy (over 100 times the proton energy in the LHC) that the earth is actually opaque to them. In fact if you look at the IceCub
byfemtobyte ( 710429 ) writes:
Putting some rough numbers on this:
Atlower energies, neutrino cross sections [cupp.oulu.fi] scale roughly proportional to energy with sigma/E ~ 10^-38 cm^2 / GeV. At high energy [fnal.gov], the cross section at 10^15 eV is around 10^-33 cm^2. Thus, compared to an ~1MeV neutrino with a cross section on the order of 10^-41 cm^2, the PeV neutrino has ~10^8 greater cross section. You are about 10^-7 the thickness of the earth. Thus, you are roughly 10x more likely to be hit by a PeV neutrino passing through than the earth is to be hit
byRoger W Moore ( 538166 ) writes:
Yes - you have to go a above 1 PeV to get a decent chance of an interaction in a human - I did say "really high"!
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