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Posted by pcdavid 8 hours ago

Physics Girl: Super-Kamiokande – Imaging the sun by detecting neutrinos [video](www.youtube.com)
376 points | 57 comments
roelschroeven 5 hours ago|
Dianna got better sometime last year as well, just in time to fly home to Hawaii for her father's funeral (yeah ...), but she got a lot worse again later. I really hope things will keep going well for Dianna now.

Props for her husband who's been incredible of taking care of her.

PaulKeeble 1 hour ago||
This is the nature of ME/CFS (caused by Covid or otherwise), it does vary somewhat over time although the course is not always to improvement or around the same level but sometimes to death. She received some form of experimental treatments in order to gain the prior recovery which was at least a stellate ganglion block, she has not mentioned what else she may have received.

Hopefully she maintains a higher baseline from here on out and the production of these videos doesn't produce further Post Exertional Mailise that could worsen her condition.

dataflow 5 hours ago|||
Man... I came here hoping to read she was fine now. Had no idea things got worse again :( I hope things get better for her.
Jeremy1026 4 hours ago|||
At the moment, she appears to be progressing up. The user you are replying to was talking about a past up-swing followed by a down-swing. Hopefully there isn't a down-swing to follow this current up-swing.
aaron695 45 minutes ago||
[dead]
ayhanfuat 6 hours ago||
Such amazing news. She’s been bedridden due to long Covid. Got better a few times but after a while attacks came back. Both she and her husband showed great strength. So happy to see a new milestone.
patcon 5 hours ago|
thanks so much for the context. I'm glad if she's reclaiming from her losses <3

i want to be more appreciative every day for my health post-covid... not everyone was so lucky, and I can only imagine the gut-punch it is to know everyone went through a thing, but you got singled out for some perpetual daily punishment :'(

dotancohen 15 minutes ago||
The video mentions that this image was taken during the night time. If the neutrinos do not interact with the entire Earth on their way through, then how do they interact with the sensor?
davidmurdoch 7 minutes ago|
Watch the video
jesse_dot_id 4 hours ago||
Long COVID is a nightmare. I'm glad she's able to fight it off enough to do the things she loves again.
cleandreams 6 hours ago||
Wonderful to hear. Her long Covid was heartbreaking (saw the videos). I hope she gets stronger and stronger! Welcome back!
hinkley 40 minutes ago|
Some of my favorite YouTubers have done guest spots on her channel, which made me love them a little bit more.

Her back catalog is good and you still get paid for people watching your old videos.

Brajeshwar 6 hours ago||
Welcome back. One of my staple YouTube Subscriptions.

I’m today years old learning that the light that we actually see on earth today came out 100s of thousands of years ago.

gosub100 4 hours ago||
It's not the same photon though. The fusion happens in the core, then takes millennia for the energy to escape. During that time photons are emitted and absorbed by the atoms, until the surface emits one that finally travels to the earth in 8 minutes. Anyway that's taking you from the ELI5 to the ELI9 version. I'm sure someone on here can correct it further.
amluto 4 hours ago|||
I haven’t tried to look up the history of this claim, but here are some guesses:

1. There’s a sort of diffusion process going on. Photons from the core have some mean free path as a function of radial position (and, obnoxiously, of wavelength as well, so maybe we ignore that). You could calculate the mean time for a hypothetical object emitted from the core and traveling according to those mean free paths to escape.

2. You could imagine you have marked a photon and watched it travel. This is quite problematic. First, photons in thermal equilibrium obey Bose-Einstein statistics because they are indistinguishable bosons, and anything that could mark them would change the statistics to that of distinguishable particles. But whatever, the temperature is high and maybe this doesn’t matter. Also never mind that those core photons are mostly much shorter wavelength than the photons we see. But you can still imagine. (The answer is probably quite similar to #1 since this is sort of the same problem depending on how you think about the interactions with matter in the sun.)

3. You could calculate how long it would take to notice anything if the core suddenly stopped fusing.

mncharity 25 minutes ago|||
The canonical Q/A pair "Why does the Sun shine?"/"Fusion in its core" perhaps contributes confusion here? Where the question is silently swapped out for "Why is the Sun still shining after 4+ Gyr?". You're primed for a close connection between core and surface photons. Asking "Why is there fog over the uncovered corner of the pool?", one seems unlikely to appreciate "the fog comes from a small aquarium heater somewhere on the bottom!" (IIRC the magnitudes). "The Sun is hot, and hot things glow" creates less of that association between core and light.

> You could calculate how long it would take to notice anything if the core suddenly stopped fusing.

FW(little)IW (very not my field, just AI, quick&sloppy), for a Sun magically switched to contraction-dominated heating, I'm sloping order 10^6-7 yr for a 1% increase in surface temp, with core contraction dynamics being just one uncertainty.

gus_massa 3 hours ago||||
I agree. I read the 5000 years time a few times and I don't like it.

When you have a transparent medium like water or glass, the photon that enters and the photon that exit share a lot of properties, in particular energy/color/frequency. Perhaps they have a shift in the phase or a different polarization (like in water with sugar or if you want to be fancy a quarter wave plate). You can still split a beam before in enter and make interference experiments after half of it passed though water or glass, and other weird experiments, so I think it's fair to call them "the same photon".

But in the Sun, the original photons in the center of the Sun have a few very specific values of energy/color/frequency, that are totally lost. (But the neutrinos have so few interactions that they don't lose this information, and it's possible to do neutrino spectroscopy!)

Also, the photons emitted by the "surface" of the Sun have a wide spectrum of energy/color/frequency that is very close to black body radiation at something like 5000K-6000K.

So in my opinion it's better to think that the original photon in the center is absorbed shortly after it's emitted, and transformed into heat. The heat takes 5000 years to get to the surface. And then the hot surface emits a few new photons unrelated to the original one.

I'm not sure what is the main transmission method inside the Sun: conduction, convection or radiation.

amluto 1 hour ago|||
belated edit: My comment about “whatever, the temperature is high” is silly. The mean photon energy is about 2.7kT, which scales in direct proportion the interest bits of the Maxwell-Boltzmann and Bose-Einstein distributions (see [0] and [1]). At 2.7kT, the curves are pretty close, but you don’t have to go down that far to get a big difference. So tagging all the light would cause a substantial change in the sun’s color.

[0] https://scholarship.haverford.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... Eq. 16 [1] Handy plot at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quantum_and_classica...

teamonkey 2 hours ago||||
Photons are generated in the star’s core but the core is dense. The photons move around the core, bouncing off other particles, a random walk. It takes a vast amount of time for that photon to escape the sun and reach the Earth, as per monte-carlo simulations of this random walk.

However, as the photon collides with other particles during its random walk, some of its energy is transmitted to those other particles. Sometimes a collision transfers energy to it too.

In a simple model, the energy that originally belonged to the photon gets transmitted from particle to particle through convection, and can escape the star through radiation long before the original photon reaches the surface. I don’t think that model is supposed to be physically accurate, rather to be an illustration about the convention process inside a star.

fsh 4 hours ago||||
Any interaction between light and matter can be modeled as absorption and re-emission (stimulated or spontaneous) of photons. In this picture, there is not much difference between a photon traveling through the sun or through a piece of glass, and the analog makes physical sense. Since photons are massless elementary particles, they are indistinguishable and their number is not conserved. The notion of "the same photon" is questionable in any case.
Hikikomori 4 hours ago|||
Similar to how infrared radiation works in our atmosphere, minus the timescale?
PunchyHamster 5 hours ago||
[flagged]
MyHonestOpinon 5 hours ago|||
Oh, probably skipped physics too. I haven't seen the video (yet), but I would have bet that light on earth came out 8 minutes ago from the sun.
pantulis 5 hours ago||
Light from the sun that is reaching us now escaped the surface of the sun 8 minutes ago, yes.

But photons are generated in the core through nuclear reactions, where they take their sweet amount of thousands of years bouncing around until they get out.

mikkupikku 3 hours ago|||
I think this is right in a certain sense, but not precisely. From what I understand no visible light photons are created in the core from nuclear fusion, it's mostly a bunch of gamma rays that get almost immediately absorbed. The energy, but not the photons from fusion, gets transfered up through the layers of the sun, through radiation and convection, eventually heating the photosphere. It is then the photosphere, white hot, which ultimately radiates the visible light we see as sunlight.
gpvos 5 hours ago|||
And thats a fact you don't need to learn in high school, at least you didn't in my time.
JeanSebTr 5 hours ago||||
They probably meant, as explained in the video, "light from our sun"
smarf 5 hours ago|||
...did you skip human socialization?
hinkley 39 minutes ago||
How much of the mass of the universe is neutrinos?
dylan604 2 hours ago||
I think Super-K is the place with water so pure that it will leach pretty much anything which was discovered when one of the tech's hair got wet while leaning over the water. The hair looked bleached after it went into the water. My googlfu is not finding anything to confirm though
pbhjpbhj 1 hour ago||
Ha, I had never heard of this effect despite having studied Kamiokande (well neutrinos, at least) as part of a mini-dissertation for my B.Sc.

However, looking for sources relating to leaching by ultra pure water (UPW) not much turned up.

I did however find on Google Scholar a paper "Ultrapure Water: friend or foe?"... which lead me to https://www.balazs.com/sites/balazs/files/2023-03/pub0039-up... . Reading between the lines, Marjorie Balazs appears to have made a career out of UPW; she says in that paper:

"The ability for UPW to absorb and dissolve or react with all kinds of materials complicates other aspects concerning its use in the processing of wafers."

Seems like UPW dissolves anything, so lends credence to the anecdote.

Interesting topic, hadn't thought about UPW for wafer fabrication before.

hinkley 33 minutes ago||
Isn’t that also the one where a sensor imploded and caused a chain reaction that destroyed like a third of the other sensors?
magicalhippo 8 minutes ago||
Yes, except about half. This[1] article goes into how and why, without the fluff.

The chain reaction escalated uncontrollably, and within ten seconds, approximately 6,800 of the 11,129 PMTs were destroyed.

[1]: https://physicscommunication.ie/neutrino-detector-in-peril-t...

dejongh 4 hours ago||
What an amazing storyteller. I will watch many more of her videos. I hope she will make many more videos ♥
jwr 6 hours ago|
So happy to see her back! It was a grueling journey and we were all crossing our thumbs, waiting and hoping…
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