Friday Fun Fact – 24th April 2026

Neutrinos in the Sun is an image of the sun physically shot through the earth. Neutrinos are a form of particle that pass through the earth and us constantly, but are very hard to detect. Readily produced in nuclear reactions and particle collisions, they can easily pass completely through planet Earth without once interacting with any other particle.

In the 90s in Japan, they built a large-scale detector known as the Super-Kamiokande, to detect the very small amount of neutrinos that would interact with the water in the detector in such a way that the detectors on the wall would be able to pick them up.

In a span of 500 days, data was collected that produced enough data to be able to “take” an image of the sun, using only neutrinos that are detected from nuclear fusion in the sun’s interior. The brighter parts are where more neutrinos are detected.