National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) | 2014 Aug 27
The neutrino experiment in the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratories has managed to measure the energy of our star in real time: the energy released today at the centre of the Sun is exactly the same as that produced 100,000 years ago.
For the first time in the history of scientific investigation of our star, solar energy has been measured at the very moment of its generation. This has been announced by the Borexino experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS) of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). The study is published on August 28th, 2014 in the prestigious international journal Nature.
Borexino has managed to measure the Sun’s energy in real-time, detecting the neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions inside the solar mass: these particles, in fact, take only a few seconds to escape from it and eight minutes to reach us. Previous measurements of solar energy, on the other hand, have always taken place on radiation (photons) which currently illuminate and heat the Earth and which refer to the same nuclear reactions, but which took place over a hundred thousand years ago: this, in fact, is the time it takes, on average, for the energy to travel through the dense solar matter and reach its surface. The comparison between the neutrino measurement now published by Borexino and the previous measurements concerning the emission of radiant energy from the Sun shows that solar activity has not changed in the last one hundred thousand years. "Thanks to the results of this new Borexino research we have seen, via the neutrinos produced in the proton-proton (pp) reaction, that it is the chain of pp nuclear fusions which makes the Sun work, providing precisely the energy that we measure with photons: in short, this proves that the Sun is an enormous nuclear fusion plant," says Gianpaolo Bellini, one of the fathers of the Borexino experiment. ...
Detecting Neutrinos, Physicists Look into the Heart of the Sun
University of Massachusetts, Amherst | 2014 Aug 27
Neutrinos from the primary proton–proton fusion process in the Sun - Borexino Collaboration
- Nature 512(7515) 383 (28 Aug 2014) DOI: 10.1038/nature13702