3 ms·

How can the neutrinos travel at light speed though? Or is this saying that the neutrinos have such a lead time over the photons that the photons themselves hav

• hnuser123456 2y ago
  Neutrinos have such a hilariously small mass that we are struggling to detect if they travel any slower than light at all, but it is thought that they are slower by an incredibly tiny amount, as in, by somewhere in the range of 1 mile slower per 5000 years. And at this speed, one mile translates to 5 microseconds, which is still nothing compared to the hours it takes for the light from the core of a supernova to push through all the rest of the stellar matter on the way to the surface. A supernova would therefore need to be about 5 trillion light years away for the photons to catch up to the neutrinos. But the universe isn't even close to being that old or that big, and even if it were, a supernova that far away would be impossible to detect at all. These extra high energy neutrinos are travelling even closer to the speed of light than average ones. An average neutrino might be travelling at 99.(15 nines)% the speed of light. This one was traveling at 99.(37 nines)% the speed of light.