But the detector, operated all the way until 1994, recorded only about one-third the expected number of neutrinos. Calculations predicted that of the 10 million billion neutrinos passing through the tank every day, roughly one would interact with a chlorine atom and change it to argon. That prompted Davis to build a neutrino collector - a tank holding 100,000 gallons of cleaning fluid - nearly a mile underground in South Dakota’s Homestake mine. ![]() Bethe’s original equations had shown that nuclear reactions in the sun’s core give birth to neutrinos, subatomic particles so elusive they rarely interact with matter and thus exit the sun without delay. ![]() So, half a century ago, American chemist and physicist Raymond Davis decided to find out what’s happening inside our star in the present day. So, observations of sunlight today give researchers a picture of what was going on in the interior long ago. While it takes sunlight just eight minutes to travel to Earth, the energy generated in our star’s core needs tens or hundreds of thousands of years to meander to its surface. But an experiment that started in 1967 made astronomers just a tad uneasy. With that mystery solved, solar scientists thought they had a pretty good understanding of what was going on at the heart of the sun. (Credit: Brookhaven National Lab) Back in 1938, physicist Hans Bethe figured out that the Sun and other stars generate energy by fusing hydrogen into helium. ![]() Construction of the neutrino detector inside the Homestake Mine in South Dakota.
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