Talk:Solar neutrino

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 January 2021 and 8 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): PHYS 563 Student (KT).

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:45, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Clarification request

Nice Article on the subject. I think the end could do with some re writting to clarrify it. Will come back when I have time. Hope my changes meet with approval. CaptinJohn 14:45, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Questions I think should be answered in the test: (1) What does the reaction in the the bottom right box in the diagram represent? My guess is that it is a fission reaction. (2) What does the asterisk "*" mean in this box, and the one above? My guess is that it means 8Be is radioactive. (3) If I am right about (1) and (2), why is there no gamma in the reaction to carry away some of the realeased energy?

After writing the above, I found answers to my questions on the Physics Forum

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/solar-neutrino-reaction.821588/#post-5157704

I hope some one will incorporate this information into the article. I am reluctant to try that myslf since i am unfamiliar with using the proper formatting and style. BuzzBloom (talk) 12:19, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

I have finally decided to try my hand at the edits I feel are necessary. It took some trial and error to finally get it right. That is why several edits are in the history log rather than one. One of the changes is to explain the asterisk in the figure, and to add asterisks to the equations to match what is in the figure. I also added the equation corresponding to the last one (lower right) in the figure. Then I changed "atom" to "nucleus" and "atoms" to "nuclei". This is because all the reactions discussed are nuclear reactions, since there are no atoms involved; all nuclei are fully ionized so that no electrons are bound to the nuclei. BuzzBloom (talk) 18:51, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Clarification request

When you type in 'solar neutrino" on the search page you get the pop-ups:

 Solar neutrino
 neutrinos produced by processes above the solar photosphere

and

  Solar neutrino problem
  major discrepancy between measurements of the 
  numbers of neutrinos flowing through the Earth and 
  theoretical models of the solar interior

Both of theses descriptions are inaccurate, particularly the first one, and are contradicted by the articles themselves. The neutrinos are produced in the Sun's core, not above the photosphere. And the 2nd description does not indicate that the discrepancy has been resolved by the observation of neutrino oscillations.

(These incorrect descriptions sound like something a believer in the Electric Universe might have written, since it is EU dogma that there is no fusion going on in the Sun's core.)

But since these errors are not in the articles themselves I don't know how to correct them. Maybe somebody else does. Archimedes100 (talk) 19:52, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Ray Davis and the Homestake Neutrino Detector

The mystery of the missing solar neutrinos took over 30 years to solve. Using a neutrino detector that was a large tank of dry-cleaning fluid deep in the Homestake mine in South Dakota, Nobel Laureate Ray Davis' team determined that the flux of neutrinos from the Sun was only about 1/3 the number that were predicted according to the Standard Solar Model. That was because only one of three (or four, if you count sterile ones) possible types of neutrinos produced in that reaction can have an electroweak interaction with chlorine atoms in tetrachloroethane molecules, converting them into inert argon gas, the dissociated atoms of which are detected and counted after several weeks.

References:

http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb/Papers/Popular/Scientificamerican69/scientificamerican69.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212686414000211

Corroboration of the predictions of the Standard Solar Model and recent accurate measurements of sound speeds over the entire volume of the sun yield rms values within 1%, unless you take your information about the age of the Sun from a creationist website suggesting Intelligent Design values for the entire universe to be a number of years that is much less.

That age is on the order of 4.5 x 10^9 solar years, which I did not see referenced in this article, and which is the whole point of doing such experiments.

Danshawen (talk)danshawen —Preceding undated comment added 12:40, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Percentages

I question the percentages given for the different sources of neutrinos (86% ad 14%). They do more or less correspond to the values one can calculate from the accompanying figure, but I think those figures are also wrong, and the image file gives no reference. I think it's about 93% neutrinos from the pp reaction and 7% from the others. Does anyone else have something to say on this, with a reference? Eric Kvaalen (talk) 17:02, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

The latest and greatest source for solar neutrino fluxes (that I'm aware of) is this paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/835/2/202. Table 2 of that paper lists two different solar models (GS and AGS), those fluxes give approximately 91.5% or 92.3% (respectively) for the pp neutrino fraction and 7.5% or 6.9% (respectively) for the Be7 fraction. That paper also states that the GS model is more consistent with measurements, so for this page it's probably okay to just provide the GS calculation fluxes. Although it would certainly be a good improvement for this page to discuss the two different solar models and their affect on the neutrino fluxes. 73.18.156.222 (talk) 17:20, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Clarify introduction

The introduction states: "A solar neutrino is a neutrino originating from nuclear fusion in the Sun's core, and is the most common type of neutrino passing through any source observed on Earth at any particular moment." This is pretty confusing. Why are neutrinos passing through "sources", are the sources where neutrinos pass through observed, or are the neutrinos observed? Are the mentioned sources on earth, or just observed from earth?? Also, the sentence is probably wrong, because in the vicinity (few km) of nuclear reactors, the neutrino flux from the reactor is probably stronger than the flux of solar neutrinos at that position. So please let us clarify this. --Geek3 (talk) 17:38, 2 May 2024 (UTC)