Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Neutrinos may be the first messengers announcing the next supernova in our Milky Way. 👻🎇

Stars many times more massive than our own sun can explode in a fiery supernova, spewing their guts across the cosmos. (That's the star stuff we're all made of!)

An enormous amount of a supernova’s energy, a whopping 99 percent, is carried away by a burst of neutrinos (of all flavors) in a span of about 10 seconds.

The core of the collapsing star is incredibly dense, but because neutrinos interact so rarely, they escape from the center even more quickly than the light does. Neutrino observatories will thus be the first places on Earth to see a supernova and can be used to direct optical telescopes to the right part of the sky to witness the arrival of the supernova’s light.

Learn more at https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/sources/supernova-neutrinos/

Antimatter sounds like something cooked up for a science fiction story, but it is as real as you are. 🌌✨

Antimatter particles look almost like their matter twins: They have the same masses, but they have opposite charges.

An antineutrino is thus simply an “opposite version” of a neutrino. But if one of the main ways matter and antimatter are opposites is charge, then what does it mean that neutrinos are neutral?

Are neutrinos and antineutrinos the same thing? Scientists aren’t sure. There are many experiments under way or proposed to discover whether that’s the case.

Learn more at https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/types/antineutrinos/