How do you know what's going on in the heart of the Sun? The photons produced by deep thermonuclear fusion reactions can take hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years to escape. And during this journey, they are absorbed and reissued countless times, irretrievably losing information about the events that gave rise to them. Physical models still allow us to reproduce what must happen at the heart of our star to explain its “visible” properties: the energy radiated on the surface, its jolts, its mass, its thermodynamic equilibrium, etc.
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But there are also direct witnesses to this chaotic interior life: neutrinos. These particles are emitted in very large quantities by nuclear fission and fusion reactions but interact very little with matter. Electrically neutral, very light, they pass through almost everything they encounter as if nothing had happened. Each second,
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