I’d heard this before, but the presumption was always that the yearly cycle was almost certainly due to some human or weather influence on the measurements. But this article claims not, and especially says that there’s a second cycle apparently timed to the Sun’s rotation.
File under “cool if true”. It’s past time we discovered some really new physics.
ETA: my favorite quote from the article: “What we’re suggesting is that something that doesn’t really interact with anything is changing something that can’t be changed.”
So carbon-dating is cobblers then: back in biblical times the sun was less active, speeding radioactive decay, thus the earth is about six thousand years old after all. Better get to church…
I have no clue if this is a reputable site or the Space National Enquirer.
The one thing which struck me odd was the mention near the bottom of the 28-day period of rotation of the Sun’s surface.
Per Sun - Wikipedia and other things I’ve read over the years, the Suns’ surface doesn’t rotate at a uniform rate. The surface at the poles rotates more slowly than the surface at the equator.
The 28 days mentioned in the article is a reasonable average, so that’s not too far-fetched a discrepancy to find in a non-specialist publication.
But the quote where the expert sounds surprised about differences between internal and external rotation rates rings false. If it’s schoolboy-level knowledge that the surface rotates at differing rates at differing latitudes, then it’s an inevitable logical consequence that the lower layers rotate at some other rate.
Aaah, but if the Earth is that much younger, then the Second Coming must be much farther in the future, right? Plenty of time for more hedonism / heathenism.
Actually on review I find it remarkable the idea that the Earth is sufficiently dense to stop enough neutrinos to make a significant impact on decay rates. That bit makes me think it could be something else.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but for anyone interested: C14 dating is already calibrated with other known-good dating methods, precisely because “raw” C14 dating gives incorrect results. See Radiocarbon dating - Wikipedia
I was surprised to hear about this recently (although the original papers came out quite a while ago). I note that the data from Germany looks really good (as in “many too good to be true”, while the other data is fuzzier (although the periodicity is clearly there, under the noise).
the question is what would be the mechanism responsible. I suspect “solar neutrinos” was suggested simply because they couldn’t think of anything else likely. But I think that, at the back of everyone’s mind, there’s the suspicion that maybe it has something to do with, say, the lab dimensions due to seasonal contractions, or the dependence of sensors depending on something similarly seasonally variable. It’d be interesting to see if you can experiment for this using, say, space probe-gathered data.
Couldn’t we use the RTGs on space probes? If the count rate changes then the power delivery should change as well. So anything flying away from the Sun should see less influence than one racing towards it since the hypothetical unknown particle’s density/m[sup]2[/sup] should increase the closer you get to the source.
Or place 5 sets of experiments progressively deeper in an abandoned mine shaft - something like the SNO site where you could monitor neutrino density at the same time.
Thought that too, about the RTG’s on say, Voyager 2. I read though that the power output also scales with exterior temperature, and the drop in temperature from being so far from the Sun makes it difficult to assess any change in decay rate. Doesn’t make sense to me—I’d think you could easily account for the temperature—but it’s what I was told.
What I don’t know is why someone doesn’t place samples of radioactive material next to areas of artificially high neutrino flux, like right next to a nuclear reactor, and see if there are any differences in decay rate. Also, if high neutrino fluxes interfered with radioactive decay rates, wouldn’t we have noticed it already in the behavior of reactor core materials and fission products? Nobody noticed that say, Xenon-135 has a half life of 9.2 hours if we leave it within the core, but 9.5 hours when we look at it in the lab?
I don’t think the designers included any way to directly measure the decay rate of the RTG’s, only the net production of power they yield, which is dependent on exactly how cold the environment is. Also, I don’t know if the isotopes typically used in RTGs are the ones that the effect has been claimed to have ever been observed. As for reactors, two things: first, technically fission reactors generate anti-neutrinos, not neutrinos*, and secondly no one is sure that the influence in question is in fact neutrinos; if it’s real, it’s something that the mass of the Earth has no appreciable effect on, and neutrinos are the only thing that fits the bill that is known to current physics- which in any case doesn’t predict a suppression of radioactive decay anyway. The best test we could make of this would be to include an isotope experiment on a Mercury orbiter or some other solar probe.
*except for lingering doubts in some camps as to whether neutrinos might not actually be their own antiparticles.
There are several neutrino observatories around the world like Kamiokande. I think they would have noticed periodic fluctuations in the number of solar neutrinos. Since none of those projects are even referenced, this sounds like bullshit to me - at least as far as the neutrino theory goes. Whether the phenomenon is real or not, we’ll have to see. It wouldn’t be the first time the standard model didn’t have all of the answers.
Do neutrino detectors detect enough neutrinos to pick out a small variation over the course of a year? I thought they typically registered something like five neutrinos a day.
It’s an open question (though I think the evidence is currently somewhat on the side that they are), but it’s really only relevant for low-energy neutrinos (that is, neutrinos with kinetic energy much less than their (tiny) mass). In practice, for high-energy neutrinos, even if they’re their own antiparticle, their spin state can be used to distinguish “neutrinos” from “antineutrinos”.
I highly, highly doubt that this is a neutrino effect, though. First, you’d expect some evidence of periodic variation in the solar neutrino detectors. Second, though, the neutrinos are produced in the core, and flares and the solar cycle are a phenomenon of the corona and other upper layers, far from the fusing region.
My guess? What these measurements are actually doing is just detecting perfectly ordinary particles emitted by the Sun (mostly protons and electrons), and mistaking those detections for detections of radioactive decays. The detections at night aren’t due to the particles traveling through the Earth, but around it, bent by the Earth’s magnetic field.
I’m not sure which observatories are still running. SNO (Sudbury neutrino observatory) was shut down in 2006 apparently. And ICE CUBE, the one in Antarctica isn’t up yet.
Anyway, neutrinos are notoriously difficult to capture so the detection rate is probably quite low and they then have to extrapolate. I don’t know what the conversion factor is though - 1 to a billion, a trillion, more? IDK.
It also depends on the energy range that the detector is designed for. The first detectors i think were only able to capture those in the high energy range. More recent versions like Super-K III (see previous post) I think can detect the full range and all 3 types of neutrinos but I’m not sure.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that neutrinos have a small amount of mass and oscillate from one “flavor” or type to another. I think that is the reason they can be detected at all - since they sometimes do interact with normal matter.
Their oscillation is a different process than the ones by which they’re detected: Oscillation depends on their having mass, but mass is irrelevant for all of the detection reactions. In fact, neutrino oscillation long caused a puzzle because it was preventing detections: Early neutrino detectors were only sensitive to one of the three flavors, and only detected a third as many neutrinos as were expected from the Sun. They were oscillating to about equal parts of all three flavors, so most of them were escaping detection.
