Dr. Lokken informs Ryland in chapter 13 that CERN plans to release a paper on the discovery of how Astrophage store energy, and that “frankly it’s amazing” 13.176. To Ryland’s surprise, neutrinos are the answer to the Astrophage energy storage mystery.

The neutrino is an electrically neutral subatomic particle of extremely low mass. Neutrinos have been referred to as “ghost particles” because they generally pass through normal matter without leaving a trace. In fact, the first evidence of neutrinos was obtained in 1956 at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of Project Poltergeist. It is estimated that approximately 100 trillion neutrinos pass through an individual human body every second.

Though the neutrino was once thought to be massless, we now know that there are three different flavors of neutrino (electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino) as well as three different neutrino “mass states” (labeled 1, 2, and 3), although these mass states do not perfectly correspond to the three neutrino flavors. The exact measurement of these different mass states remains elusive.

Lokken explains that “there’s a large neutrino burst every time they kill an Astrophage” and that “They even took samples to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and punctured them in the main detector pool. They got a massive number of hits.” 13.178 IceCube is a neutrino detector located deep under the Antarctic ice at the South Pole. The detector is primarily focused on picking up distant astrophysical sources of neutrinos such as gamma-ray bursts and stellar explosions, although the majority of those earlier mentioned neutrinos that pass through your body every second originate much closer to home, inside the Sun.

In a 1930 letter, physicist Wolfgang Pauli predicted the existence of a neutrino-like particle. A primary motivation for sharing this fact is simply because we enjoy “Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen” as a way to begin one’s correspondence.