In research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists report that they first discovered an almost-volatile particle called neutrinos, which can detect carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion inside the sun, known as the CNO cycle.
It is a landmark that confirms the theoretical predictions of the 1930s, and is regarded as one of the greatest discoveries in physics of the new millennium.
“It’s really a breakthrough for solar and stellar physics,” said Gioacchino Ranucci of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), who has been researching the project since it began in 1990.
N 65 miles northeast of Rome, at the foot of Mount Apennine, the world’s largest underground research center – Scientists used an ultrasonic boraxino detector at INFN’s Gran Sasso Particle Physics Laboratory in central Italy.
Decades of research into the Sun’s neutrinos have been discovered by the Boraxino project, and for the first time it reveals the molecular reaction that most stars use to fuse hydrogen into helium.
Almost all of our stars, including our Sun, emit huge amounts of energy by fusing hydrogen into helium – effectively the “burning” path of hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element and major fuel source in the universe.
In the case of the Sun, 99 percent of its protons come from proton-proton fusion, which can form beryllium, lithium and boron before breaking down into helium.
But most of the stars in the universe are much larger than our Sun: for example, the red-giant battalions are about 20 times larger and about 700 times larger.
Larger stars are also hotter, meaning that they are driven by CNO fusion, which converts hydrogen into helium by atomic nuclei transformed into an infinite loop between carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
C.N.O. Chakras are the dominant source of energy in the universe. But it is difficult to live inside our relatively cold sun, where it is only about 1 percent of its energy.
The giant boraxino detector detects neutrinos given at the origin of the sun during nuclear fusion.
Neutrinos rarely interact with anything, and so they are ideal for studying distant nuclear reactions – but they are also very difficult to find.
Millions of neutrinos from the sun pass through the boraxino detector every second, but it only searches for dozens of people every day while searching for the brightness of light as it crumbles in its black-100-ton water tank.
Ranucci said the boraxino detector has spent many decades measuring neutrinos from the Sun’s main proton-proton chain reaction, but it has been very difficult to find its CNO neutrinos – only seven neutrons in the CNO cycle.
The discovery needed to make the detector more sensitive over the past five years, he said, by protecting it from sources outside of radiation so that the detector’s inner chamber is the most radiation-free space on Earth.
The result is a C.N.O. The only direct indication of fusion has ever been seen: “This is the first evidence that CNO The wheel works in the sun and the stars, ”said Ranuchi.
Particle physicist Gabriel Orebi Gane of the University of California, Berkeley called the discovery the “main target.”
“This discovery takes us one step further in understanding the origin of our sun and the formation of heavy stars.”
Orebi is the author of a scientific article in Gen Nature about the new study, but was not involved in the research.
Neutrinos naturally occur in nuclear reactions and pass through most objects without effect, so they can be used to investigate otherwise inaccessible regions of the universe, he said.
Because of this, many neutrino detectors, including the IceCube Observatory at the South Pole and the Super-Comiconde Detector in Japan, are looking in the dark for their transient presence around the world.
It is theorized that the neutrinos of the Big Bang are responsible for some mysterious “dark matter” in the universe – huge invisible haloes around stars and galaxies that make up about a quarter of its mass.
Orebi Gan said that the asymmetry between neutrinos and their antiparticles could also explain the apparent lack of anti-matter in our universe and the dominance of its common substances – in other words, why there is nothing here, nothing more perfect than that.
