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Article: Hot earth: geophysics. (counting neutrinos produced by radioactive decay in the Earth)(Science and Technology)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- January 31, 1998
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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NEUTRINOS are the most abundant particles in the universe, and possibly the most useless. Of the roughly ten thousand trillion trillion that reach the earth each second (most of which are produced by nuclear reactions in the sun), all but a handful pass straight through the planet as if it wasn't there. So, though astrophysicists set underground traps for these neutrinos in order to learn more about the sun (and also about farther-off stars that happen to explode in neutrino-generating supernovae), they catch only a few thousand of them a year.
Now, two separate groups of researchers are proposing to look for neutrinos from the other direction. The earth beneath your ...