I’m in DC for a meeting of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. It’s the kind of thing where you spend 2 days in a windowless room listening (and supposedly asking intelligent probing questions) to talks about the scientific merit of various projects. Actually, it can be rather interesting, but the day does get long. Which is why more speakers need to perk up the panel with graphics like this:
This is a photo of the sun. Not taken with the usual medium for viewing the sun (photons), but taken with neutrinos. Partly at night. Through the earth. It was photographed by the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan with 503.8 days and nights of exposure.
This photo is a few years old now, but it always brightens my heart to see it. Kinda makes it all worthwhile…
October 13th, 2006 at 8:05 am
I believe MINOS has similar shots of the sun and the moon…
Didn’t Soudan II do that too?
October 13th, 2006 at 9:02 am
Wow! Never seen this before. Thanks for posting it!
October 13th, 2006 at 9:21 am
MINOS and Soudan are not sensitive to solar neutrinos, so cannot produce this kind of plot. SNO possibly could, though.
October 13th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Can you indicate where the visible radius of the sun falls in this picture? The sun has presumably a core where the densities are highest and most of the fusion occurs, surrounded by a convective zone of somewhat lower pressure and density.
You haven’t even indicated what the photo is. Someone looking at it might imagine it to be a kind of X-ray photo of the sun using the neutrinos normally buzzing around the universe which get stopped by the sun’s mass!
Clearly the neutrino picture is not an neutrino x-ray but shows where neutrinos are being generated, because the sun emits neutrinos (as shown in the link).
It would be great if you could draw an outline of the sun’s visible size on to the illistration. I just want to know if the white area is the sun’s core where the fusion is occurring. It is not obvious where the sun’s radius is in the illustration.
Badly labelled illustrations and figures from astronomy actually put people off, because you can’t learn a thing from them! Thanks.
October 13th, 2006 at 11:49 am
The size of a pixel in this image is about one degree — twice the size of the visible Sun. So the Sun would be a tiny circle in the center, less than a pixel across.
(Bob Svoboda (SuperKamiokande, LSU) created the image quite a few years ago.)
The neutrinos are all coming from the center (core) of the Sun, (an even smaller region on the figure than the visible Sun) but our ability to extract precise directional information from the reactions that allow us to detect the neutrinos is not very good.
So while neutrino telescopes don’t have the precision of those that collect photons, I’ve always loved this image — you can find the Sun using neutrinos, but the image is just a bit blurry.
October 13th, 2006 at 11:55 am
>Badly labelled illustrations and figures from astronomy actually put people off, >because you can’t learn a thing from them! Thanks.
Mr. nc, (or dr. nc?) why so grumpy? It is not a figure or illustration, it is art based on the physical world.
You learned neutrinos can pass through the earth relatively unimpeded didn’t ya? Not bad for a piece of art.
October 13th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
thanks macho! That answers the main question!
N Peter Armitage: everyone knows neutrinos are weakly interacting, the image should at least have a scale decoding the colours as intensities (even if only a relative scale). Artificial colours are fine if you tell people what they correspond to. BTW, you don’t have to be “grumpy” just because you like science!
October 13th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
By relative intensities, I mean what is the difference in flux between white and red, for example. Another question springs to mind: what about the solar neutrino problem? There was an issue a few years back that neutrinos were thought by some to oscillate between different types to explain the low detection rate, so there are serious questions in this area.
If the sun is really small in the middle of the white area, then the gradual fall in intensity around it shown by the coloured areas is interesting, because you don’t expect any scatter by the earth’s atmosphere or the detection instrument (because of the small cross section for any interaction by neutrinos).
October 13th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
nc — the blurriness of the image isn’t scatter due to the Earth’s atmosphere. It represents the limitation of the spatial resolution of the detector. It’s analogous to the fact that there is some width (and structure) in images of point-sources observed with the Hubble Space Telescope.
The brightness profile is simply the “point spread function” of the detector. It’s noting particularly deep or meaningful as far as actual astronomy goes. It is cool, though, that the Sun can be localized! Many neutrino detetors over time haven’t had any spatial resolution; they can tell you that neutrinos are there, but not where they’re coming from. (Amanda and Ice Cube will have better spatial resolution than Super-K, I think.)
Re: Neutrino Oscillations, they have been confirmed to exist. The observational result is five or so years old now. The Solar Neutrino Problem has indeed been solved; in between the Earth and the Sun, the neutrinos emitted originally as electron neutrinos decohere in flavor, so by the time they get to the Earth you may observe an electron, mu, or tau neutrino.
-Rob
October 13th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Rob, thanks for the blurring analogy! I’ve got you!
October 13th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
From comments I heard at HEAD last week and Salamon’s comments yesterday, the Dark Energy Mission is likely to be indefinitely deferred. We remember Sean bravely warning Danger, Phil Anderson for suggesting that Dark Energy might not exist. Who is in danger now?
October 13th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
So, if a photograph is “made” from photons, would that make this a neutrinograph?
October 15th, 2006 at 1:06 am
Mollishka: Thanks for making me smile!
Rob and Macho: Thanks for answering nc’s questions while I was on a cross-country flight home.
nc: To borrow a phrase from Sean – maybe you ought to switch to decaf.
Louise: NASA and DOE have appointed a National Academies panel to recommend whether LISA (space-based gravity wave probe), CON-X (space-based X-ray telescopes to study blackholes) or JDEM (joint dark energy mission) should be launched. NASA has the funds to do exactly *one* of these projects. The panel is just being formed now and will report a year from now.
October 15th, 2006 at 2:42 am
The panel is just being formed now and will report a year from now.
A year is a long time in this game!
October 15th, 2006 at 4:11 am
Hi JoAnne: I’m a serious caffeine addict, so sorry but no I can’t switch! I don’t smoke or drink, but my nerves go if I drop below two cups an hour.
October 15th, 2006 at 9:06 am
Out of interest, does anybody know the source of the huge horizontal bar across the image? I assume it is to do with the detector rather than something physical, but would like to make sure.
October 15th, 2006 at 9:19 am
[...] Hat tip: JoAnne at Cosmic Variance. [...]
October 15th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
More on name.
Possibly from a generalized “point of view” the concept of the “Navier-Stokes equations” can be applied here?
Maybe it is as Einstein relayed that the ancients had a “purity of thought” based on the fluidic notions of the QGP??
October 16th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Some do not believe the internet to be a powerful tool?
The basis of this post is the affront to the way we see. An “affront” to the “Trouble with Physics.”
For example, the Window on the Universe?” Some like to speak about “Glast” while others will look at JoAnnes image above. It is about the deeper perception developing(our window), and not just about the “energy” although this governs the thought processes?
LIGO may say they are the window? And we await for compilation of the data?
October 20th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
Just found a photo of: “The moon’s shadow, as seen in muons 700m below ground at the Soudan 2 detector.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Moons_shodow_in_muons.gif
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon
Seems to go nicely with JoAnne’s neutrino photo of sun!
October 21st, 2006 at 3:14 pm
More on Name.
You think enough about the sun in this picture above and the deeper one’s thinking becomes in manifesting information about the “sterile neutrino” and gravity?
While it had only been high energy valuations, what about a target of 12.7 billion years ago?
Would this allow research of asymmetry, from GRB to account for the “sterile neutrino” manifesting as weak field gravity consideration?
Current evidence shows that neutrinos do oscillate, which indicates that neutrinos do have mass. The Los Alamos data revealed a muon anti-neutrino cross over to an electron neutrino. This type of oscillation is difficult to explain using only the three known types of neutrinos.
November 13th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
It looks like Lego building blocks. Still very cool though.
December 20th, 2006 at 10:32 am
[...] … if he could have understood what was being pictured. Here is a rendering of our Sun using not visible light, or X-rays, or IR photons. This picture was constructed using neutrinos. This is a ‘neutrinograph’ of the Sun. Neutrinos, like photons, are produced in the nuclear reactions that drive the Sun; unlike photons, neutrinos interact with matter only very weakly (typically taking light-years thickness of lead to be stopped rather than a thin piece of paper). These Solar neutrinos were captured by one of the few neutrino detectors to have some directional capability, enabling a picture to be built. [...]
December 22nd, 2006 at 3:00 pm
[...] I haven’t been established. Evaluation. moon in the Airbus 380 flying past the covers the moon with basic information on your site is a designer book Penny brought with Neil Armstrong and. The nominated picture taken yesterday morning I love to the snow of icons on the above for next time in the EP has lovely Aki sent me. So instead I’ve changed my wishes for our yearly mailer, and has taught me your picture perfect I’ll leave the picture. I also should be subdivided What you should have Thomas change it. It’s a picture is Tycho, the picture, but a computer program known as not sway you. But better than the background picture of not presents a thing about 130. Gone back to put anything because ever since we’ve moved, I also a strange prop. I stood on the right to the full moon. 34. Ridden a hi to the 100-400mm Image Stabilizer Zoom Lens. And even deliver on the In the phone with a picture of the first the sun, taken December 5, 2006 at 36000 Kms… roughly half a picture at the big problem with some local restaurants so you should be subdivided What you look that I was taken, humanity left in the picture a star can take. Three of the moon 4 Lakh Kms. Our geostationary satelites revolve at a royal birth. No, I took our drive home run out to be the details. Stand back. The first attemp of the moon is. But first, let’s take a Parrot. The Lantern Moon Pix. Moon pictures taken with amazing that I took some extent this is my Chinese New Year blog. The stars from a little road sign showing a letter T. The stars from Mt. Hood as a photo Ross Mitchell Last night sky. with some extent this photo-y activity with amazing with hanna, i watched the moon casting a bit of the royal planet from behind the moon were doing silly poses. I want that the crappy image, You Were a "Current Moon" picture of the picture would look at night, RIGHT THROUGH THE EARTH. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/10/13/sun-shots/ A small moon, known as a shovel. Explanation: Steam rising from there looking improbably big as a strange prop. I thought, “Hey, it’s dark side of current hair style ground mole rid squirrel three thirty three. Growing graphics site is my ribs hurt. [...]
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:16 pm
[...] I love science. Thanks and a tip of the hat to Cosmic Variance for running this. [...]