Fusion reactions in stars, including our Sun, produce huge amounts of neutrinos. These tiny elementary particles are almost impossibly hard to spot: ludicrous numbers of neutrinos are passing through you right now, without noticing your atoms at all. But they're one of the only ways we have to understand the inner workings of the Sun's core — and deep underground beneath an Italian mountain, astronomers have *finally* spotted neutrinos originating from the final piece of the stellar fusion puzzle, the CNO cycle.
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Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.
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Things we talked about in this episode:
Comet NEOWISE
Spotting NEOWISE in the sky: North America, the UK
And so is China
The CNO Neutrino research (PDF slides from talk)
Nature article about the research
Neutrinos, sneaky things
The CNO cycle