The existence of the neutrino was predicted by the pioneering physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the 1930s. I have done a terrible thing,'' he once said. Twenty years later, Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines, proved Pauli wrong. While working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the pair detected neutrinos for the first time. The hope is that a particle that is almost nothing may tell us everything about the universe,'' says theoretical physicist Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin.
Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in nature.
They are produced in the universe's most cataclysmic events, dating all the way back to the Big Bang. When a star exhausts its fuel and collapses in a violent explosion, called a supernova, it releases most of its energy as neutrinos. A less spectacular but equally important source of neutrinos is the nuclear reactor that powers a single star. It can produce 10 billion trillion trillion trillion trillion neutrinos. Every now and then, as zillions stream through the Earth, one neutrino hits something so squarely that it releases a short burst of energy.