A physics mystery has come to an end, with a resolution about as shocking as “the butler did it.” For a decade, physicists have pondered why nuclear reactors pump out fewer particles called neutrinos than predicted. Some suggested the elusive bits of matter might be morphing into weirder, undetectable “sterile” neutrinos. Instead, new results pin down what other experiments had suggested: that theorists overestimated how many neutrinos a reactor should produce.
“This is not a surprising result, but it’s an important one,” says Georgia Karagiorgi, a particle physicist at Columbia University who was not involved in the work. “It’s still something that I wanted to see.”
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