Massive neutrinos and new standard cosmological model: No concordance yet
Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - 08:30
in Astronomy & Space
Neutrinos, also known as 'ghost particles' because they barely interact with other particles or their surroundings, are massless particles according to the standard model of particle physics. However, there is a lot of evidence that their mass is in fact non-zero, but it remains unmeasured. In cosmology, neutrinos are suspected to make up a fraction —small but important— of the mysterious dark matter, which represents 90% of the mass of the galaxy. Modifying the standard cosmological model in order to include fairly massive neutrinos does not explain all the physical observations simultaneously.