Question: What have you found out about neutrinos?

Jordan McElwee answered on 19 Mar 2020: last edited 19 Mar 2020 1:47 pm

There are many interesting things that we know about neutrinos, and even more that we don’t!
The most fascinating thing is called ‘Oscillation’. There are 3 types (flavours) of neutrinos, called the electron, muon and tau. In oscillation, an electron neutrino can change into a muon (or tau) neutrino, or vice versa. Imagine if you threw an apple into the air and when you caught it, it had turned into an orange! That’s how surprising this process is. We now know why this happens, and it’s because each neutrino doesn’t have one specific mass, but a combination of masses.. which is really hard to get your head around. But we don’t know what these masses are yet, and it’s one of the things we’re trying hard to work out!