Life on our planet can not continue without sunlight, which feeds almost all life on earth, but the problem is that there are few ways scientists can study the processes that cause our star to shine.
Scientists this week approached the understanding of interactions in the nucleus of the sun, by creating a detailed picture of the energy emitted.
and analyzing neutrinos, also known as "ghost particles," which emanate from the sun's nucleus to the Earth's surface at 100 billion per second.
"With these new data, we can say that the result is the most streamlined of the fusion reactions that occur within the sun," said Andrea Pocar, co-author of the study and physicist at the University of Massachusetts. "Once we have more accurate data, Operations of the sun ".
Neutrinos are fine particles that have almost no mass and no electronic charge, and are too small to pass through matter and rarely interact with it.Our current model of the Sun indicates that 99% of its energy comes from a series of nuclear fusion processes in which hydrogen is converted into helium. During these processes, neutrinos are also released.
The scientists used the Borexino Observatory, built under a mountain 60 miles east of Rome, to detect small flashes of light emitted by neutrinos as they interact with electrons on Earth.
The Observatory is surrounded by a thousand tons of water, which is the most radiation-free explorers on Earth.
By collecting and analyzing approximately 100 neutrinos per day, the team was able to reconstruct nuclear fusion processes, known as proton-proton interactions (pp), with unprecedented precision.
Dr. Pocar explains that over time, the algorithms developed by the team of 100 researchers have allowed the transition from studying individual neutrino molecules to creating a snapshot that includes the full energy spectrum of the sun.
While scientists can easily study the sun, by measuring the amount of heat and light emitted, physical research in essence is not surprising."This study is the culmination of a decade of data, but more than two decades of thinking, designing and taking data," Pocar said.
"Neutrino is the only thing that can actually appear unaffected by the nucleus of the sun," Pocar said, "and everything else we see has gone through many processes, from the nucleus to the surface, which took tens of thousands of years."
Instead, neutrino particles take only 7 minutes to reach Earth. Because of this, the team's snapshot also confirms the current theory that solar activity has been steady for at least 100,000 years.
Dr. Pocar hopes that the Borexino experiment, scheduled for another 3 years, will reveal one of the inner solar mysteries, its mineral content.