The secret life of neutrinos
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 14-Jul-2025 17:11 ET (14-Jul-2025 21:11 GMT/UTC)
A team of researchers, including several from UC San Diego, have shown, through theoretical calculations, how collapsing massive stars can act as a "neutrino collider,” which may result in either a neutron star remnant or black hole remnant, depending on the “flavor” of the neutrinos.
Instead of a tempest in a teapot, imagine the cosmos in a canister. Scientists have performed experiments using nested, spinning cylinders to confirm that an uneven wobble in a ring of electrically conductive fluid like liquid metal or plasma causes particles on the inside of the ring to drift inward. Since revolving rings of plasma also occur around stars and black holes, these new findings imply that the wobbles can cause matter in those rings to fall toward the central mass and form planets.
The scientists found that the wobble could grow in a new, unexpected way. Researchers already knew that wobbles could grow from the interaction between plasma and magnetic fields in a gravitational field. But these new results show that wobbles can more easily arise in a region between two jets of fluid with different velocities, an area known as a free shear layer.