Map captures Earth’s antineutrino glow
Planet’s crust, nuclear reactors are hot spots in newly released image
By Meghan Rosen
Each second, more than 10 septillion (1025) antineutrinos race away from Earth and into space. That’s 100 trillion times as many antineutrinos as stars in the galaxy. But who’s counting?
Leave that to particle physicist Shawn Usman of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield, Va. In September in Scientific Reports, he and colleagues published the first global map of antineutrinos, harmless subatomic particles (and the antimatter cousins of neutrinos) born when radioactive elements break down. That decay happens within the planet’s crust and mantle and in nuclear reactors.