Rare ghostly particles produced inside the sun just detected under a mountain in Italy

By Diane Lincoln - Live Science Contributor 5 hours ago



Image: © NASA Goddard)

For the first time ever, physicists have spotted rare, ghostly particles produced by a weird kind of fusion inside the sun.

The particles, called CNO-produced neutrinos, traveled from the sun to a detector buried deep beneath a mountain in Italy. This discovery brings humans one step closer to understanding the fiery nuclear reactions fueling our home star.

"With this outcome," physicist Gioacchino Ranucci, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Milan, told Live Science. "Borexino has completely unraveled the two processes powering the sun."

Two types of nuclear fusion reactions occur in the sun's core. The first, and most common, is proton-proton fusion, where protons fuse to transform hydrogen into helium. Scientists predict such reactions generate 99% of the sun's energy. Rarely, nuclear fusion occurs via a six-step process, called the CNO cycle, where hydrogen is fused to helium using carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and oxygen (O). Proton-proton fusion and the CNO-cycle create different types of neutrinos, subatomic particles that are nearly massless and can pass through ordinary matter without a hint of their presence, at least most of the time. Physicists routinely detect neutrinos created during the proton-proton process. However, on June 23, at the Neutrino 2020 Virtual Meeting, researchers from Italy's Borexino detector announced that they had detected CNO-produced solar neutrinos for the very first time.

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