The anomaly was detected in a nuclear reactor storm and is so disorienting that physicists hope it will unravel dark matters, the greatest mysteries of the universe.
But new research definitively rules out that these odd measurements signal the presence of “sterile neutrinos,” a hypothetical particle that scientists have long avoided.
Neutrinos are sometimes called “ghost particles” because they barely interact with other matter — an estimated 100 trillion pass through our bodies every second.
Since the neutrino was first theorized in 1930, scientists have been trying to understand the properties of this shapeshifter, which is one of the most common particles in the universe.
There are three confirmed flavors of neutrinos: electron, muon, and tau. However, physicists suspect there may be a fourth neutrino, nicknamed “sterile” because it doesn’t interact with ordinary matter at all. [ka/pp]
