Mondo Knows Facts
A gold mine caught the Sun's neutrinos
Raymond Davis used 615 tonnes of cleaning fluid to count solar neutrinos From the late 1960s Davis ran a tank of perchloroethylene deep in the Homestake mine, where rock screened out other particles. Neutrinos occasionally turned chlorine atoms into radioactive argon, which was flushed out and counted. He found only about a third of the expected flux, a shortfall later explained by neutrinos changing flavour. It sits in Mondo's space collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Tags: neutrinos, sun, experiments
A gold mine caught the Sun's neutrinos: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Raymond Davis used 615 tonnes of cleaning fluid to count solar neutrinos. The figure is taken from NASA Science, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a space fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Space shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.