If confirmed, the results offer a significant clue toward solving a fundamental mystery about the sun. They also could boost efforts to explain the origin and future of the universe, and help complete a family tree that physicists have drawn of subatomic particles. The subject of the research, reported today at an international meeting in Tokyo, is a tiny particle first theorized about in 1931 by physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He merely saw the neutrino as a bookkeeping device to balance an equation about a neutron decaying into a proton and electron. Neutrinos weren't discovered in the lab until 1956.
Nature creates neutrinos in at least three ways.
For example, they are formed by nuclear explosions taking place in the center of stars. And staggering numbers of neutrinos were apparently a byproduct of the Big Bang, the explosion that may have spawned the universe. Neutrinos also result from collisions between cosmic rays and Earth's atmosphere. Detecting these miniscule particles is difficult, because they rarely interact with other particles. To spot enough interactions to make meaningful measurements, data must be gathered over along period of time using detectors that present the biggest target.