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Astronomy and Cosmology
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Do supernovae generate neutrinos or antineutrinos?
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[QUOTE="Ken G, post: 6862930, member: 116697"] It's not the goal to prove it, proofs are for mathematicians not scientists. Instead, we make predictions, and test them-- but we cannot test everything, so there are some things we must take as assumed. One is that if we do a test today, we don't need to repeat it tomorrow. But note this is not so much an assumption as a tested hypothesis-- it has been observed to hold, we just can't [I]prove[/I] it will hold tomorrow (because we never prove anything). But there's a difference between saying, we have already tested something in one context and we think it should hold in a similar context without having to test everything, from recognizing something that hasn't actually been tested in the context of interest. That's the issue with neutrinos from supernovae-- if no one has observed (and I don't know if this is true) neutrinos from a supernova, only antineutrinos, then we have something that has not been tested and we should at least recognize that. In the same vein, I would note that there was considerable satisfaction when antineutrinos were observed from SN 1987A, even though this was certainly expected. How can we claim that it was exciting to detect antineutrinos from a supernova as a check on our theories, but we know they will be outnumbered by regular neutrinos so we don't have to check [I]that[/I]? I completely agree, that's basic Occam's Razor-- we hold to the simplest version until found otherwise, since we have simple brains and cannot overcomplicate things. But we still want to know if the simplest version will hold, so we test it [I]whenever we can.[/I] We have tested that it works to assume the same physics "out there" as "down here" (which came as a big shock when first discovered), so that's a tested hypothesis but it could have limitations. (Again, neutrino oscillations were not known from the laboratory, as they require large scales.) I recall a person who claimed that the purpose of the mission Gravity Probe B was to "verify that GR is correct." I say no-- the purpose was to "test GR," a subtle but important difference. I agree that these are all good indirect ways to predict the neutrino flux. We also had good ways to predict the gravitational wave signal of various astrophysical systems, and I'm sure many GR theorists were just as confident that gravitational waves were a real thing, but it was still a big headline when gravitational waves were actually directly detected. We get surprised a lot, just not most of the time. As I said, it's not the neutrinos that annihilate, but when antineutrinos interact they create antileptons, and those annihilate. I think that might be the reason it is easier to detect antineutrinos, but it could be other things too. I'm basically curious as to why it is easier to detect antineutrinos, and I'm curious if we have ever tested that supernovae produce far more neutrinos than antineutrinos. Kamioka-type experiments don't look for proton decay, yet as far as I can tell they also detected antineutrinos from supernovae. That's the context I was referring to, Cerenkov emission in water. [/QUOTE]
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Do supernovae generate neutrinos or antineutrinos?
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