2015-10-07. Physics Nobel Winners Also Solved Solar Mystery.

posted Oct 21, 2015, 6:37 PM by Alan Gould
By JoAnna Wendel, Earth & Space Science News. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 3. Excerpt: Although they won the prize for showing neutrinos have mass, the two Nobel-winning physicists also solved a long-standing mystery of solar neutrinos. Physicists Takaaki Kajita from the University of Tokyo in Japan and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, received the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday for their pioneering discovery that neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that are constantly streaming through all of space, even straight through the Earth, can change from one form to another. This finding in turn proved that the tiny particles have mass—a discovery that challenges the prevailing theory of particle physics, known as the standard model. In the process of discovering the neutrino’s changeable nature, the scientists also solved a decades-long mystery about the Sun: the case of the “missing” neutrinos....In the 1960s, scientists were investigating the theory that the Sun’s energy comes from nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium deep within its core—a reaction that releases neutrinos, which zip through the Sun toward Earth. Because the reaction happens so frequently, scientists expected to find a vast number of neutrinos hitting the Earth. However, their models disagreed with experimental evidence—they found only a third of the neutrinos they expected. So where were the missing neutrinos? ...It turns out that the neutrinos were there, but some had morphed. In the experiments that helped secure their Nobel Prize, both McDonald and Kajita helped make this discovery....  https://eos.org/articles/physics-nobel-winners-also-solved-solar-mystery