How galaxies help scientists weigh ?ghost particles? ? and why you should care

From these particle physics experiments, we know that at least two of the three neutrino species have mass.TNW’s finance, blockchain, and business event is coming up soonYet little has been known about the mass of the lightest species – until now. Our new study, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that the lightest neutrino is at least 6m times lighter than the mass of an electron, at 0.086 electron volts (a unit of energy). This was confirmed when scientists detected the first neutrinos from a supernova in 1987, providing a better understanding of supernovas and neutrinos alike.On a cosmological scale, however, because these ghostly particles have mass, they tend to drag a little bit of matter with them thanks to gravity. And some particle physicists are skeptical of cosmologists’ statistical techniques, claiming their way of using prior knowledge, such as estimating that the mass cannot be negative, influences their results.We combined the two by creating a mathematical model to calculate the sum of the neutrino masses by studying the large scale structure of more than a million galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). We then fed in what we know from particle physics experiments, which told us in very exact terms what the relationships between the masses of the neutrinos should be.