Readers ask about neutrinos in the sun’s core, megaflashes and mussels

Thursday, September 10, 2020 - 23:31 in Physics & Chemistry

Probing the sun Neutrinos produced in the sun’s core could shed light on how much of the sun is composed of elements heavier than helium, Emily Conover reported in “Physicists spot a new class of neutrinos from the sun” (SN: 8/1/20, p. 11). Reader Simon Read was curious about other ways physicists could study the sun. He suggested gravitational waves might be a good way to study the sun’s massive eddies. In general, just about any accelerating massive object can produce the spacetime ripples known as gravitational waves, but most are too tiny to detect. That’s probably the case for gravitational waves from the churning of the sun, Conover says, “otherwise we would have seen them already.” There’s more that goes into the formation and detection of gravitational waves than just an object’s mass. “For example, the object’s acceleration has to be large enough and the waves emitted have to match the frequency of...

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