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Currently Playing: NOBEL PRIZE FOR NEUTRINOS! #shorts

Let’s talk about the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics which was announced this month and awarded to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Essentially for his role in this discovery published back in 2013 of two extremely high energy neutrinos. Neutrinos are incredibly tiny particles, that barely interact with anything around them. 100 trillion pass through your body every second, mostly from the Sun because they’re produced in nuclear fusion reactions. They’re tiny, so have very small area, so very small chance for collisions. They’re neutral, so don’t interact with electromagnetic force, aka light, its why they were thought to be dark matter for a long time, but they have too much energy to explain structure of the universe. They also don’t react with strong force, the thing that binds atoms together, only the weak force which governs radioactivity, and gravity. But what it means is that if a high energy neutrino is produced by a high energy object or process out there in the Universe, nothing really stops it or slows it down, it just keeps going in the same direction. So if we could detect one, we have a hope of figuring out what direction it came from, and therefore what object it came from. Great, except for the fact neutrinos barely ever react with matter, so building something to actually detect they’re there is very difficult. You have to wait for a possible, but extremely unlikely direct collision between neutrino and normal matter particle which produces a flash of light that you can detect. If you run the maths based on predictions of how many neutrinos something like a supernova is meant to produce, and how likely a collision would be with normal matter in a detector here on Earth, you find the chances are just below 1 high energy neutrino per year for a detector with an size of a km2. So that’s what IceCube collaboration did, they built a detector over an area 1km2, buried 2.5km underneath the Antarctic ice at the south pole. They drilled holes and poured in boiling water before dropping down their detectors, and letting the ice refreeze again. And yes the jury is still out on what could be producing these PeV neutrinos, although ask most people and their money is on blazars, aka growing supermassive black holes throwing off a jet of material from surrounding region, and the jet is pointing right at us. But key thing for Nobel prize is that the existence of these high energy neutrinos had been predicted for decades alongside all the cosmic ray science going on which was also winning Nobel prizes through 20th century, and finally IceCube managed to detect them in 2013. Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: martino.freelance@gmail.com Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com