Explosion in 1987

It was the night from February 23 until February 24, 1987 in the astronomical observatory of The Bells, in the Chilean Andes. One of the assistants of the astronomer who this night was operating in one of the telescopes went out a moment on the outside and looked at the sky. Suddenly he realized that there was something beyond the common there above. Inside this whitish spot that is the Big Cloud of Magallanes, a galaxy satellite of ours, there was a star especially brilliant, a star that should not be there. It ran to the interior and attracted attention of the astronomer who was bottled in his own remarks.

Some hours before the discovery of these two astronomers slightly also completely unusual it was happening almost to another side of the balloon, inside a mine of zinc left in Japan. In the Kamioka mine there was developing an experiment that was trying to verify one of the most fascinating predictions realized by a theory of the particles physics much in vogue in that epoch. The called theories of big unification were predicting that in this universe nothing is eternal, not even the matter. According to his calculations the proton, one of the constituents of the atomic nucleus and of the one that believed that it was immortal, in fact was disintegrating. The Japanese verified it it had filled an enormous deposit with 3.000 tons of the purest water and they had surrounded it with multitude of detectors destined to register the twinkles of light that would generate the products of his disintegration. To avoid other undesirable sparks provoked by the thunderstorm of elementary particles that comes to us from the cosmos, they had buried this immense water bucket in the depths of the mine of Kamioka, to 3.300 meters deep.

About half after 7 in the afternoon of February 23 his detectors went off suddenly twelve times. Simultaneously, another detector buried in the mine of salt Morton-Thiokol close to Fairport, Ohio, told 8 neutrinos, and a third detector placed under the mount Andyrchi, in the Caucasus, registered the arrival of 5 neutrinos. What had caused similar crackling? The jet of neutrinos that, after hundreds of thousands of years of trip, had swept the Earth originated from this brilliant star discovered in Chile.

Two events were corresponding to an explosion of supernova, the first visible one to simple sight from 1604. In the following months big part of the telescopes of the world continued even the most minimal detail the course of this impressive deflagration, the most violent end that can happen to a star. A star with several times the mass of our Sun had died was doing 170.000 years and this day, February 23, 1987, the news about his death was coming to us: of ten trillion trillions of neutrinos that took place in the explosion 25 were detected only.