YOU could be forgiven for thinking that particles that whizz through the planet with no effect are inconsequential. Not so.
Such particles – neutrinos – occasionally interact with matter, producing flashes in particle detectors. “Sterile” neutrinos, on the other hand, are even harder to find as they are loath to interact with ordinary matter – a characteristic that makes them a prime candidate for being the stuff of dark matter. Since their “discovery” in the 1990s, though, their existence has been heavily debated.
Now physicists have repeated the original experiment and found that this ethereal entity may not be a mere statistical error (see “Sterile neutrino back from the dead”). If it turns out that sterile neutrinos are not a figment of our imagination, we may finally have answered one of the most pressing questions in cosmology.
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