the.com/neutrino
A particle so shy it can pass through a lightyear of lead without touching anything.
means A nearly massless, electrically neutral subatomic particle that barely interacts with matter, produced in nuclear reactions like radioactive decay and fusion inside stars.
from Coined by physicist Enrico Fermi in the early 1930s, from Italian 'neutrone' (neutron) plus the diminutive suffix '-ino,' meaning 'little neutral one.' The name was a joke of scale: physicists had just named the hefty neutron, and Fermi needed a word for a particle that seemed to carry away energy in beta decay while weighing almost nothing and refusing to be detected — so he made it the neutron's tiny, elusive cousin, right down to the shrinking suffix.
- mass
- nearly zero, but not actually zero
- abundance
- trillions pass through you every second
- nickname
- physicists call them ghost particles
- origin
- made in stars, reactors, and your own banana