Astronomy / Space The 'missing' mass of the universe?

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for the discovery that neutrinos switch between different "flavours". So why has the work been deemed worthy of the highest award in science?

First proposed by the Austrian Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, neutrinos are among the 17-odd irreducible building blocks of the world around us.

They're also wallflowers in the world of sub-atomic particles, rarely interacting with the other matter around them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34454831

Apologies for the BBC reference. Its writers are never particularly intelligent at the best of times and never more so than when it comes to anything that involves accuracy.

But this would seem to be an outstanding discovery.
 
If you're wondering if they could be the dark matter you're always hearing about, they can't. Essentially, they move too fast to do the job.
 
"Dark Matter" is just matter that is not producing light or EMR...correct? Why are we looking for exotic 'dark matter' when there are gazillions of planets and orbital bodies that are 'dark'?
 
If you're wondering if they could be the dark matter you're always hearing about, they can't. Essentially, they move too fast to do the job.

No, your assumptions of the nature of dark matter have no basis. All that is known is a lot of mass is missing.

This discovery suggests that what was assumed to be massless in fact has mass. Whether that will be sufficient mass to fill the arithmetic void remains to be seen.


"Dark Matter" is just matter that is not producing light or EMR...correct? Why are we looking for exotic 'dark matter' when there are gazillions of planets and orbital bodies that are 'dark'?

Not quite. the nature of dark matter in unknown. All that is known is it's apparent affect.
 
"Dark Matter" is just matter that is not producing light or EMR...correct? Why are we looking for exotic 'dark matter' when there are gazillions of planets and orbital bodies that are 'dark'?

You can determine the fraction of matter that is baryonic (normal matter) can be determined in a couple of way - looking at X-rays from the gas in galaxy clusters, and looking at light element abundances and using our understanding of how they were formed in the Big Bang. These indicate that most matter isn't atomic.
 
No, your assumptions of the nature of dark matter have no basis. All that is known is a lot of mass is missing.

This discovery suggests that what was assumed to be massless in fact has mass. Whether that will be sufficient mass to fill the arithmetic void remains to be seen.

Your assumptions about my assumptions have no basis. There are multiple lines of evidence for dark matter. An obvious and classic one is the rotation curves of spiral galaxies and the velocity dispersions in elliptical galaxies. They show big mass concentrations in and around galaxies that are not consistent with the distribution you can infer from the emitted light.

Neutrinos are known to have mass, and known to have very very little mass (cosmology and the distribution of galaxies in the universe actually give the tightest constraints). Particles without a lot of mass given even a tiny amount of energy will go very very fast, and you can't make them stay in a galaxy long enough to hold the galaxy together. Worse than that, we have pretty good ideas about how structures form in the universe (based on very uncontroversial gravity and big computer simulations) and you can't get the observed numbers and distribution of galaxies just with the known amount of ordinary matter plus neutrinos within the mass constraints we have for them.

It's not just that we know matter is missing. It has to broadly have certain properties to work right - it's a very big 'broadly' but it excludes the kind of neutrinos in question.
 
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